Harnessing AI and Automation for Business Transformation
Henry Ford is not credited with inventing the automobile. His significant achievement was integrating the assembly line into the manufacturing process of the automobile. This made automobile manufacturing scalable to meet the accelerating demand for his cars at a price point that made it affordable for so many more people.
The assembly line was an early form of automation. It streamlined and standardized the production process, allowing for repetitive tasks to be completed more efficiently and consistently. While not fully automated like modern systems, it represents an early step towards automation by optimizing human labor and machinery to work in a coordinated, efficient manner.
Scale and Automation go Together
So, what does this have to do with IT and AI? Well, everything, because the lesson Mr. Ford taught us is that you can’t have scale without automation. Imagine if you had to manually classify all your data, provision thousands of devices or deploy an update to even more endpoints. If indeed you were even able to complete those tasks, the lack of timeliness would make the work a waste of time.
AI possesses extreme scalability because it can process vast amounts of data and perform complex computations far beyond human capability. It can analyze large datasets quickly and accurately, identifying patterns and insights that would be impossible for humans to detect. AI can handle numerous tasks simultaneously, increasing overall productivity and its earning capability allows AI to adapt to changing conditions and requirements without needing constant human intervention. AI has natural scalability, but automation is required to enable this scalability.
By combining automation and AI, organizations can create intelligent workflows that adapt and optimize based on real-time data and insights. AI-powered automation can dynamically adjust processes, prioritize tasks, and allocate resources according to changing conditions, enabling more efficient and responsive operations. This allows your IT operations to be driven by AI algorithms that analyze real-time traffic patterns, utilization data, and service-level agreements while monitoring and incident response become proactive and automated.
Defying the Learning Curve
There is no doubt that creating and training an AI model, along with the necessary supporting infrastructure, requires teams of highly technical people, including data scientists. However, what often goes unmentioned is that for the user, AI is easily learned. Unlike many previous technologies that required extensive training, coding knowledge, or a technical background, AI is intuitive and accessible. Through natural language interaction, the need for specialized technical skills is reduced. This democratization of AI empowers individuals and organizations to harness its capabilities without the traditional barriers of technical expertise, fostering widespread adoption and innovation. AI is the technology for everyone.
Expanding Use Cases for AI
When you place the empowering technology of AI in the hands of your employees and give them the ability to verbally interact with it using natural language, amazing things start to happen. Your employees will think of use cases that you haven’t thought of, extracting greater value in the form of problem solving and greater efficiency. They learn to ask AI questions pertaining to their vendor’s past projects, including timelines, delays, cost overruns, and reasons for missed deadlines. This data-driven approach can reveal patterns and potential risks.
The possibilities are endless. AI can surface relevant internal knowledge, documents, and resources for employees based on their queries through natural language processing and machine learning. AI-powered automation can take over routine, repetitive tasks like answering basic queries, and data entry. AI can be tasked with doing the introductory work for complex projects. With much of the lower-value initial work out of the way, your talented engineers and analysts can apply their expertise in refining solutions more efficiently.
In the same way that factory and warehouse workers have been working alongside robots for some time now, AI will simply be a coworker for your employees, augmenting their skills and capabilities. Skill augmentation is one of the more exciting areas where companies can benefit from AI, empowering their workforce to achieve greater productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage.
AI and the Manufacturing Sector
We began this article by discussing the manufacturing sector, which is primed for AI and automation empowerment. While manufacturers have learned to utilize IoT technology to generate sensor-driven data, much of this data is often localized and specific to individual operations. This lack of transferable data sets has made AI implementation challenging in the manufacturing domain.
However, imagine the potential of an AI driven conversational chatbot that could be trained on a comprehensive dataset comprising schematics, manufacturing information, supply chain data, and more. Customer support could be elevated to new heights, providing accurate and contextual responses by leveraging this wealth of operational data. Now consider company mergers or acquisitions and how AI could expedite the process of consolidating and organizing data from multiple sources, streamlining the integration of disparate systems and processes.
Overcoming Initial Challenges
And there lies much of the challenge – the ability to curate and integrate diverse data sets to unlock the full potential of AI. AI requires data availability, which means getting the right data where you need it, in the appropriate file format, using data pipelines. You must also ensure that data is co-located near the right compute resources to avoid latency and costly data transfers.
While data accessibility is necessary, AI also needs boundaries to keep sensitive information like HR documents from being exposed or misused. There is also the critical task of securing not just the data, but the AI models themselves to prevent model poisoning, corporate sabotage, or other malicious attacks. Just as the hybrid cloud expands an organization’s attack surface, the reach of AI across various domains and processes also increases the potential attack vectors.
At Evolving Solutions, we have been at the forefront of helping companies overcome these challenges, enabling them to maximize the potential of AI and automation as quickly as possible. IT operations have always been the foundation of our services, and we have been pioneering automation solutions for our clients long before the explosive interest in AI. With our deep expertise in modern operations environments, we are uniquely positioned to guide businesses in seamlessly integrating AI into their operations. If you are curious about how AI can benefit your business, let us demonstrate its potential and turn that curiosity into reality.
