Artificial Intelligence

As Corona virus (Covid-19) spreads to different facets of human life and impacts business operations, industry leaders are looking for ways to mitigate the risk that could otherwise have a longer-term effect on revenues, profits and customer satisfaction.

Businesses ranging from small organizations to medium/ large sized enterprises spanning across different industry verticals are looking for ways to reduce operating costs and to improve operational efficiencies. Similarly, various professional services organizations are focusing on automating their key/ core processes implementing robotic process automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to achieve improved business outcomes and make them more competitive than what they are today.

This need to bring in improvements in business performance and efficiency in key business processes is driving RPA and AI solutions adoption across regions and industries. RPA and AI are seen as two key levers for cost reduction through faster processing and enhanced accuracy.

RPA is a software that automates routine tasks e.g. data extraction, data cleansing, applying business logic to automate various processes. This could include anything from repetitive simple point-and-click actions to handling complex data across many applications. While AI is a software solution that can perform tasks that would require human intelligence. Many AI solutions are powered by machine learning (ML), some by deep learning (DL) and others simply by predefined rules.

Implementing automation is critical at every stage of business operation
&
organizations that begin planning early will be better poised to ensure long term success

Back office and/ or mid office operations could be a good starting point for such automation. Back office automation contenders could include:

• Invoice auditing/ processing,
• Accounts payable,
• Accounts receivable,
• Billing management

Mid office processes include business specific core processes. Here the automation contenders could include:

• Fraud detection (for insurance & banking/ non-banking financial services)
• Agent or supplier onboarding
• Enrolment, billing & claim settlement (for healthcare payers – insurance organizations)
• Automating integration and transformation for data received from disparate sources

Both for back office and mid office processes, AI deployed as a part of automation could help in recognizing patterns in data/ information and help deliver improvements to business processes.

There are different categories for AI that could be gainfully used along with automation. Each of the AI functionalities could be beneficially deployed to address specific problems e.g. OCR, chatbots, statistical mining, computer vision, predictive analytics, natural language processing and deep learning.

Thus, almost all the organizations would have automation potential & possibilities. Automation & AI based solutions could be applied to routinized, higher volume and error prone tedious manual processes to reduce operating costs and to improve operational efficiencies.