Does Generative AI fit into your Intelligent Automation Strategy?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made tremendous strides in recent years and has become an essential tool for businesses to automate processes and make data-driven decisions. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of buzz around ChatGPT, a generative AI tool. The real question is, how is this going to help businesses generate real value? This blog post explores the benefits of generative AI and where it fits in a company’s intelligent automation strategy.

Generative AI, a subfield of AI, refers to the use of AI algorithms to generate new content, such as text, images, or music, based on the input data. Generative AI can even write programming code. These algorithms use deep learning and statistical methods to understand patterns in the data and generate new content that is similar to the input data.

Benefits of Generative AI for Businesses

Increased Efficiency and Productivity:
Generative AI can help businesses to automate routine and repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable time and resources for more strategic activities. For example, automate product design, marketing materials, or customer support, freeing up employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
Better Insights and Decisions:
Generative AI can help businesses to make more informed and data-driven decisions by automating data analysis and visualization. By analyzing vast amounts of data, generative AI algorithms can identify trends, patterns, and insights that can inform business decisions.
Increased Innovation and Ideation:
Generative AI can help businesses to generate new ideas and solutions by exploring new combinations of data and generating new content. This can lead to increased innovation and the creation of new products, services, or business models.
Personalization and Communication:
Generative AI can help businesses to personalize products and services for individual customers. By analyzing customer data, generative AI algorithms can generate customized experiences that meet the unique needs and preferences of each customer.

Is your business ready for Generative AI?

It is only human to want to jump on the latest bandwagon. For instance, when RPA tools were hastily implemented at scale across the organization without proper planning, it created challenges for many companies. Don’t get sidetracked by technology. The reality is, to benefit from technologies like generative AI, the underlying business process needs to be solid. In most companies that we come across, this is not the case, and they are not yet ready for generative AI for several reasons:

Technical Expertise:
Implementing generative AI can be complex and require significant technical expertise, so it’s important to consider whether your business has the resources and expertise needed to get started.
Data Quality and Availability:
Generative AI algorithms require high-quality and copious amounts of data to be effective. Is your data of high quality and readily available and assembled to make the most of generative AI?
Integration with Existing Systems:
Generative AI solutions may require significant changes to existing systems and processes to be fully integrated, which can be a challenge for many companies. This can make it difficult for companies to fully realize the benefits of generative AI and achieve their desired outcomes.
Ethical and Legal Considerations:
There are also ethical and legal considerations surrounding the use of generative AI, such as data privacy, bias, and accountability, that need to be evaluated before implementing generative AI.
Business Objectives:
Ultimately, the decision to implement generative AI should be driven by your business objectives. If your business has a need for creative outputs, automation, or improved insights and decision making, generative AI may be a good fit for your intelligent automation strategy.

Over the years we have helped several clients move up the automation maturity ladder strategically and not by just implementing the latest technologies. Check out how we helped BlueShore Financial switch to remote work overnight when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Building your automation tool kit to realize real ROI

Remember, business outcomes are more important than the technologies you use to achieve business outcomes. The first step is to create a strategic roadmap to Intelligent Automation. Technologies like generative AI should only be an additive to your overall intelligent automation strategy and tool kit. Now how to build an intelligent automation tool kit? This completely depends on the short-term and long-term business outcomes you want to achieve. Some areas to consider while planning your automation strategy are:

Process mining:
Process mining involves using software to analyze and visualize business processes to identify areas for improvement. This can be a valuable tool for determining which processes are suitable for automation.
Automated decisions:
Automated decisions refer to the use of algorithms and AI to make decisions that would normally be made by a human. This can include things like fraud detection, risk assessment, and personalization.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA):
RPA refers to the use of software robots to automate repetitive, manual tasks. This can help to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of errors.
Artificial Intelligence (AI):
AI technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NPL) can be used to automate tasks such as image recognition, text classification, and customer service.
Workflow design:
Workflow design involves creating a visual representation of the steps involved in a process. This can help to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas where automation can be applied.

All these technologies and tools complement generative AI technology like ChatGPT and may fit into your comprehensive automation strategy.

Focus on What Matters – Business Outcomes

In conclusion, technologies like generative AI should be viewed as an additive to your automation tool kit as it provides complementary capabilities, complements human expertise, addresses limitations, is cost-effective, and is scalable. As the technology continues to evolve, and in combination with other automation technologies, businesses will be able to leverage its capabilities to gain a competitive advantage and drive growth.

Still confused on where to start? Try our no-cost, no-obligation Automation First workshop where we help companies identify business outcomes and map their automation strategy and technologies around those desired business outcomes.

Some of the information provided in this article was generated with the help of ChatGTP, a generative AI tool. This information is provided for general educational purposes and is not intended as specific advice or recommendations for any individual or organization.