What Artificial Intelligence Means to Businesses in Terms of Cost Optimization, Efficiency and HR

By Nishikant Nigam, EVP and Chief Delivery Officer, CSS Corp

The rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence is influencing economies, disciplines, services and business models, and in the process modernizing operations, reducing costs, increasing service agility, and harmonizing customer experiences.

Artificial Intelligence for Cost Optimization and Efficiency in Business Operations

Intelligent automation platforms bring in a convergence of human intelligence, analytics, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), which in turn can result in improved business agility, operational excellence, resilience and faster-time-to-market. Such platforms can cohesively predict models and subsequently manage/solve complex infrastructure ecosystems effortlessly, resulting in drastically improved CX and thus, simplifying employee efforts considerably.

Some of the specific segments that Artificial Intelligence is being used by enterprises include:

• IT Helpdesk: An Artificial Intelligence enabled IT Helpdesk embraces intelligent automation, and advanced analytics, to deliver knowledge-centered and context-driven support, serving as a single point of contact for all IT service needs. This results in reduced human intervention, and hence reduced labor costs, improved end-user experience, and enables the next level of productivity.
• Self-Help Tools: Organizations are onboarding cost effective support channels like using self-help, Knowledge Base (KB), virtual assistants and live chat to fulfill the requirements of end-users. Using Artificial Intelligence and automation, most common user queries can be prevented by understanding what your users want before they turn to support.
• Virtual Assistants - Virtual Assistants can offer personalized and context-driven support, with a human-like interaction, through the usage of Artificial Intelligence, NLP and Deep Learning techniques. VAs can constantly learn from user interactions, and build on its ever-growing knowledge base. The Virtual Assistant understands user intent and responds to queries in real time.
• Omni-channel Solution - Omni-channel support promotes enterprise collaboration services through mediums such as blogs, wikis, social media and KBs. It also provides engineers with extensive use cases, high visibility into each customer issue, including transaction history and most recent channel interactions.

Artificial Intelligence in HR Management, Recruitment and Employment

Artificial Intelligence magnifies the role of HR professionals into a much broader and strategic role, which is backed with data analytics and AI-driven insights. Nearly 40% of companies are using some form of AI in HR, including prominent companies like IBM, GE, Facebook, and SAP.

AI can aid people management within organizations in several areas like accelerating the hiring process by automating screening of talent, digitizing the interview process, streamlining employee onboarding, and improving  workplace learning.

How Exactly AI and Cobot is Applied to Enhance Customer Value?

With advancements in speech recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI has become the new frontier that is truly transforming customer engagements and augmenting human potential.

A blended model of human experts and AI can offer several potential business benefits:

• Reduced Cost: A recent BI Intelligence report suggests that businesses can cut labor cost by 29% when chatbots and other AI are deployed. Though complete automation is not feasible, automating a percentage of customer success and sales positions can result in significant savings.
• Improved customer experience: AI reaches wider audience and stores critical data points that companies can leverage to personalize the offerings and also the buying experience of the digitally empowered customers. AI also helps brands optimize their product development with improved customer intelligence, which in turn delivers delightful customer experience.
• Greater consistency due to reduced human assistance: With AI revolutionizing all walks of business and life, consumers aspire to seamlessly interact with multiple apps rather than multiple layers of real human assistants thereby leading to reduced reliance on human assistance.

At CSS Corp, AI based automation is an integral part of our service delivery organization supporting global customers in various strategic and modernization initiatives. CSS Corp’s intelligent automation framework brings together two different platforms that drives modularity and nimbleness to meet the evolving customer expectations:

Contelli – Cognitive automation for IT operations (automation of back-office operations in cloud, Data Centers, telecom networks and security)

Yodaa – Cognitive assistant solution (front-office solution for customer support, customer interactions and customer analytics)

Our approach in AI for business and IT operations is largely based on customers’ business critical metrics and more closely aligned with factors impacting business outcomes.  Our AI strategy did not develop out of labor arbitrage but rather from superior customer experience, providing instant gratification and delighting customers.