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Summary

The recent past has been a time of both unprecedented change and remarkable adaptability. The pandemic, possibly the most significant global event of this generation, has also been a testament to the spirit of human resilience. To me, it is no surprise that the most compelling technologies we know today are built on an inherently human foundation. The dynamism, effectiveness, and scalability of AI make it a valuable asset for enterprise growth and resilience. The increased focus will make it a core, and perhaps the most important, element in infrastructure decision-making. An enormous part of AI’s appeal lies in its ability to mimic human behavior, a crucial feature in developing future-ready strategies. The technology has already disrupted a broad range of areas, from healthcare and customer service to product innovation and crisis management. So, let’s inspect how AI has drawn on human behavior to augment enterprise resilience and efficiency during the pandemic.

Imitating Efficiency

There are three core functions where AI has made a significant impact during the current crisis. While the overall contribution is broader, it is here that we believe AI’s most human like tendencies came to the fore.

Risk Management

The pandemic has compelled enterprises to revisit their risk management policies, ensuring that a rarely invoked clause was front and center of contract discussions. Force majeure clauses are usually included as a formality under the assumption that they may never need to be enforced or evaluated. In these unprecedented times, however, the unexpected becomes normal. Negotiating contracts with a global supplier and partner base while ensuring diligence and accuracy is no mean feat, much less when required to be completed at speed. Enterprises need help with extracting clauses such as non-performance and termination from procurement contracts, extracting force majeure clauses from contracts both historical and current, and evaluating all contracts for risk and recourse.

By using intelligent contracts analysis driven by AI and computer vision, enterprises have been able to inject efficiency into the process, allowing skilled legal teams to focus on adding value through targeted counsel instead of keeping them occupied with mundane and error-prone work. Intelligent contract analysis has also helped procurement teams find ways to unlock contract value by invoking discount clauses and renegotiating supplier contracts efficiently, allowing companies to optimize spending and capital allocation.

It will enable enterprises to understand the various covenants and SLAs in their agreements while aggregating intelligence to ensure business continuity.

Execution during a Disruption

The pandemic has placed a premium on business continuity and agile innovation. To thrive, enterprises must swiftly adapt, deliver new products and services on the go, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Digital transformation is essential to this end. Consider the case of lending businesses. With capital at a premium, timely credit is the lifeblood of small and medium enterprises, offering them offering unwavering support to tide over this difficult period. Enterprises are now using AI to segment their lender base and de-risk their portfolio through a nuanced understanding of delinquency rates. Even beyond business, enterprises are turning to AI-based applications to adjust. Supply chain disruptions don’t just affect consumer-facing businesses but also areas such as relief work, helping organizations deliver food and essentials to those most in need. Smart technologies are now assisting organizations in creating a digital twin of their physical supply chain before allowing human talent to make informed decisions based on near real-time intelligence. We expect AI-led initiatives will continue to lead business continuity plans as enterprises discover the critical role cognitive capabilities play.

Continuous Learning

Another key driver of AI consumption is continuous learning. Much like the human mind, AI-based technologies learn from various sources, including training data, application data, and their inferences. This ability to improve continuously makes AI- driven applications an attractive proposition for enterprise adoption. The rapid strides in NLP and computer vision create valuable synergies for AI to move beyond purely deterministic tasks and partner enterprise human capital. Besides, continuous learning has other benefits.

AI/ML adoption because these tools can utilize new data to make better predictions. Testing systems, fraud detection, recommendation engines, and procurement intelligence are just some areas in which AI platforms can get smarter over time.

As with any human career, direction, and purpose are integral to success. That’s why enterprises would do well to build a robust and specific problem statement to maximize intelligent interventions.

The Importance of Augmenting Human Capability

Humans, by nature, are resilient beings, both physically and emotionally. It is natural for AI to follow suit and draw on the best our species has to offer. The symbiotic relationship between these core value propositions – efficiency, accuracy, reasoning, creativity, and empathy – will pave the way for enterprises that will thrive in the long run. Either of these approaches in isolation could, however, offer a below-par result. Purely manual intervention is inefficient because deterministic tasks at scale can quickly erode accuracy while human decision-making inevitably carries some bias.

On the other hand, ERP and CRM systems, for instance, can be super-efficient but not adaptive. Furthermore, they cannot consider the nuances available to the human mind. It is here that human-digital work comes into its own, helping organizations move forward on the cognitive continuum from reactive to proactive and then predictive with immense accuracy and agility.

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A Special Blend

Humans are the most resilient species, and AI the most intelligent technology. Human resilience and creativity combined with AI’s hyper-productivity, intelligence at scale, and accuracy will make enterprises more resilient, and companies would do well to harness this value. Organizations must revisit their technology strategy in the crisis’s aftermath, and AI-driven transformation must be central to their plan. However, people will remain an enterprise’s most valuable asset, which is why organizations would do well to augment their human resources with on-demand intelligence and efficiency. People-first technology-led transformation will be the cornerstone of resilience as enterprises seek to reach unprecedented levels of excellence following a halt that has provided much introspection and courage.