Investment in AI is driven by viable use cases improving adoption. IDC’s latest report on AI says the main drivers behind investment are automation for productivity, customer satisfaction, business agility and accuracy. Over half of Australian enterprises implementing AI solutions say the deployments are enabling changes to their business models.
What are the AI-enabled business model changes?
Traditional business models are making way to the new ways of doing business in the COVID impacted world.
The IDC report stated, Conversational AI is transforming the customer care model while Predictive analytics is shifting traditional maintenance business models.
Australian enterprises are using AI Recommendation Systems to optimise transport routes, detect driving offences and determine effective environmental protection actions.
“Organisations are shifting workloads to AI solutions where the system can make decisions and act faster than employees can”, says Liam Landon, Associate Market Analyst at IDC.
Organisations are investing in AI solutions to adjust quickly to market changes and enhance the customer experience through improved business processes.”
Contrary to the perceptions of AI impacting job opportunities, the report notes AI is augmenting the employee workforce, driving changes to business models to capture real returns on improved productivity, satisfaction, agility and accuracy.
This is especially key, given the recent stress many workplaces have been placed under due to Covid-19
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Common Examples
Conversational AI as a key example of AI implementation in Australia. Organisations have deployed Conversational AI to provide consistent and accurate responses to straight-forward customer queries freeing up employee time to spend time helping customers with complicated queries.
IT operations and customer service business processes are common uses of AI and will remain frequent, with more simplistic implementations such as chatbots being popular.
Over 50% of businesses plan to increase spending on digital transformation initiatives
What next?
40% of Australian organisations said they planned to deploy an AI initiative by the end of 2020 despite dampened business spending. Gartner forecast reduced IT spending in 2020 in Australia due to COVID – Total IT spending is set to decline by 6% in Australia even as the spend on cloud technologies could increase by 19%.
Despite COVID, the IDC report said “close to one-third of organisations expect their budgets for AI to increase in 2020”.
Key focuses for 2020 will be around resiliency and redundancy as well as business processes that enable future ways of working
Technology suppliers should identify emerging new business models where they can maximise the value proposition of AI for their clients.
