Business Application Support With Artificial Intelligence

IBA Group
Mark Hillary

I mentioned in my last blog that the very nature of jobs and employment is changing today because of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Tools such as AI in business application support, are fundamentally changing how corporate processes function – and this changes the skills that people in professional jobs need. This change is prevalent throughout many parts of the modern organisational structure, but the most important area of change is probably enterprise decision support.

The problem is, how do we get from here to there? Many organisations are overrun with data. They have so much that they just don’t know what to do with it all. Some have tried to focus on data analysis, creating a data-driven approach to their business, but even those who have moved in this direction need to rely on the skills of their data scientists to try turning data into information.

As data analytics evolved, it was clear that enterprises were changing from a backwards-facing approach where they analysed past events and described what happened, to an ability to be predictive – trends and patterns that help to predict future behaviour could be found. A similar change needs to take place in enterprises using AI today.

Today, the possibilities for AI-enabled decision-making are more prescriptive, with AI providing enterprises not just a look into the future, but also key diagnostics and suggestions on potential decision options and their payoffs. Such highly evolved applications of AI can help businesses make decisions that can potentially exploit more business opportunities, while averting potential threats much earlier.

This is the real opportunity for AI in the enterprise. To create the opportunity for automated decision-making, but where the system is designed to learn, unlearn, and relearn as often as required. Insights from automated AI business application support should be powerful because the system is trained to learn where insights may be found.

I believe we will be seeing many more AI business application support systems in future – its no longer a technology of the future. These are systems that are already installed and in use in enterprises globally – have you explored what AI can do for you and your decision-making processes?