By Shishank Gupta, SVP & Head of the Digital Workplace Ecosystem and Microsoft Practice, Infosys
The average knowledge worker believes they spend about a third of their time on things such as communicating tasks or looking for documents. Well, there is indeed something to that. According to an extensive study on workplace practices, employees spend 60 percent of their time doing such ‘work about work’, 27 percent on work related to core skills, and a scant 13 percent on strategic activities such as planning and forward-looking analysis.
Between skills shortages and cost pressures, it’s not hard to see why organisations simply cannot afford to waste so much of their resources on non-core activities. The good news is that with the tremendous advances in Artificial Intelligence, they no longer need to. Capable of automating most repetitive tasks, AI is optimising operations in every industry to potentially improve business efficiency and reduce operational cost by up to 40 percent and 30 percent respectively.
Efficiency in every operation
AI’s versatile capabilities, from automation to analysis to content creation, give it universal applicability. Early adopters of robotic automation in shop floor tasks, manufacturers are using advanced AI solutions, such as image recognition to automate quality inspection, and predictive AI for early detection of equipment malfunction. Banks are leveraging AI to optimise processes in credit scoring, risk management, compliance and fraud detection. Marketers are using generative AI to check compliance of creatives with brand guidelines or to generate highly personalised email campaigns, while employees across the board are using it for writing reports and taking notes.
Automation apart, AI and analytics technologies integrate enterprise systems to provide real-time visibility into operations, thereby improving decision-making. For example, because retail companies can see right across their supply networks in real-time, they can take early action, such as locating a second supplier if they anticipate disruption in supplies, stocking extra merchandise in times of high demand, rerouting shipments, etc. Another use-case is resource management: by providing end-to-end visibility into resource consumption, AI allows businesses to rationalise usage, prioritise resources for value-generating activities, quickly respond to fluctuations in resource availability, and mitigate inefficient practices, such as wastage, overuse, and underutilisation.
