Rebecca Gibson |
This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of The Record.
Worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies will hit almost US$1.3 trillion in 2018, according to analyst firm IDC. However, LiveTiles co-founder and CEO Karl Redenbach predicts that many forward-thinking and innovative companies will go a step further by embarking on the next phase of technological evolution: intelligent transformation.
“The era of intelligent transformation will see companies approaching digital transformation with a completely different mindset,” says Redenbach. “Rather than adopting new technologies to update business processes, they’ll focus on implementing technologies that truly meet employees’ needs.”
Redenbach predicts that businesses will adopt scalable and highly personalised artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to further improve productivity, efficiency and user engagement.
“We envisage a world where companies use personalised AI solutions to automate mundane tasks and help their human employees to work to their full potential,” says Redenbach. “This will have multiple benefits, the most important of which will be that employees will be more satisfied because they’ll have more time to focus on ‘human’ tasks such as creative problem solving and improving client relationships.”
An easy way for companies to adopt AI in a simple, yet effective, way is to deploy employee-facing or customer-facing chatbots. Powered by Microsoft’s natural language processing technology, LiveTiles Bots enables companies to use drag and drop capabilities, rather than code, to quickly and easily create personalised AI assistants that help to solve specific business challenges.
“Bots can be designed for a specific purpose, so an enterprise might have a human resources bot that answers employees’ questions about remaining vacation days, or a bot that schedules meetings, or a retail bot that can surface sales data,” says Redenbach. “Companies can integrate these chatbots directly into their digital environments and manage them from a central platform in much the same way as a traditional organisation chart.”
LiveTiles Bots is already helping multiple companies to embark on intelligent transformation. A major airline is building an AI assistant that provides flight attendants with access to customer profiles and the information they need to answer passengers’ queries. Meanwhile, a distributor of building materials is creating a sales bot that provides customer notes and information about deals to help staff close sales.
“We’re promoting LiveTiles Bots via Microsoft’s major US sales channels and market responses has been amazing” says Redenbach. “We’re now in a strong position to help some of the world’s biggest organisations address common business challenges using simple AI solutions.”