Hariprasad BK
Explore the game-changing fusion of Gen AI and BPM, unlocking optimized processes, predictive analytics, and unparalleled personalized experiences, shaping the future of every industry.
Since its public roll out last year, Gen AI has rapidly evolved and has exerted a transformative influence across various sectors, akin to the profound impact the invention of the steam engine had on businesses at the dawn of the 19th century. Just as the steam engine revolutionized transportation, textiles, mining, and machine tools, Gen AI, with its ability to create new content, such as large text, images, videos and other forms of media outputs resembling human-created content, holds the potential to leave an indelible mark on every industry it will touch and have a ubiquitous impact. However, its Midas touch is poised to be nothing short of spectacular in certain sectors, and the business process management (BPM) industry stands at the cusp of this revolution.
So why is the industry going ga-ga over Gen AI’s impact on BPM? Several BPM characteristics align seamlessly with Gen AI’s capabilities, such as:
- Structured processes with unstructured data: BPM deals with a wide variety and volume of structured processes, but often encounters unstructured data and documents in diverse and complex formats, with dynamic business rules and judgment-based actions to be taken. Gen AI is tailor-made to optimize, automate and innovate in such situations. This positions Gen AI in a sweet spot to enhance existing structured processes, and even enable the creation of smarter processes and actionable insights.
- Data-driven operations: BPM heavily relies on data for informed decision-making. Gen AI can rapidly and deeply analyse large amounts of data across multiple sources, extracting hard-to-discern patterns, predicting potential issues before they escalate, and recommending corrective actions and decisions based on business context, and historical and real-time data.
- Efficiency, effectiveness, experience and empathy: While BPM aims to deliver benefits across the four E’s to streamline and power operations, Gen AI can rapidly accelerate and amplify this journey with a human plus software (human-ware) model, creating significantly greater value.
With increasing adoption in BPM and rapid technology innovation, Gen AI is poised to become the mantra to disruptively transform business operations through automating, innovating, and improving processes continually.
Where do we see these capabilities play out?
AI Redefining BPM Operations
One of the leading global insurers is experimenting with a “60-second claim” process1. This AI-powered loss assessment and evaluation enables the insurer to process a claim in less than a minute by uploading photos and documents.
The Cognitive Leap: Gen AI’s Smart Process Innovation
While AI and IA pave the way for cognitive automation, Gen AI takes transformation to a higher echelon. It harnesses the power of neural networks to create not just efficient but truly optimized and smart processes, paralleling human cognition. The result? Businesses attain levels of agility, adaptability, and impact that were previously elusive, allowing them to pivot swiftly in response to evolving market dynamics and customer expectations.
Transforming Businesses with Predictive Insights
Think of the following scenarios
- Predicting consumer behaviour in retail
- Detecting fraudulent financial transactions
- Predicting propensity of a customer to default on their payments
- Curating and creating new content
- Predicting maintenance requirements in manufacturing
Predictive analytics empowers businesses and BPM providers to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, minimize risks, eliminate inefficiencies, streamline operations, enhance productivity, and boost revenues.
In the financial services domain, predictive analytics can proactively detect and prevent transgressions and associated risks by leveraging historical data on past transgressions. Healthcare can be hyper-personalized by predicting patient outcomes fine-tuned to each individual’s health profile.
AI’s prowess in predictive analytics, coupled with Gen AI’s near-human cognitive capabilities, offers businesses not only insights into current operations, but also foresight into future trends, events, and recommended actions. This proactive approach acts as a shield against disruptions, reducing costs and consistently optimizing processes.
Personalized Experiences Amplified by Gen AI
The profound impact of AI and Gen AI on BPM manifests in their ability to cultivate genuine customer-centricity and deliver immersive, personalized experiences that resonate deeply with individual customer. Consider these examples:
- Personalized customer interactions: Gen AI can power chatbots or virtual assistants to engage customers in personalized conversations. By analysing past interactions and customer data, these AI-driven systems can understand preferences, anticipate needs, and provide tailored recommendations or assistance, creating a more immersive and personalized experience for customers.
- Agent assist and AI copilot: Using techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG), Gen AI can be a powerful ‘agent assistant’, crafting concise responses to complex questions, by drawing upon a vast knowledge repository of SOPs, policy documents, tickets, and other knowledge artefacts. AI copilots, advanced intelligent systems designed to collaborate closely with human workers, can revolutionize BPM by providing continuous guidance and personalized assistance in accomplishing various tasks. These AI-driven capabilities will serve as invaluable assets to human workers, augmenting their capabilities and enhancing their productivity.
- Dynamic content generation: AI can generate dynamic, contextual, and personalized content for customers and users. For instance, in customer service interactions, marketing campaigns, and customer communications, Gen AI can craft customized and automated responses, messages, product recommendations, or offers tailored to individual preferences and behaviours, enhancing the overall customer journey, engagement, and efficiency.
- Predictive customer service: Leveraging Gen AI for predictive analytics, BPM providers can proactively anticipate customer needs or issues before they arise. By analyzing historical data and patterns, AI systems can predict potential service requirements and issues, enabling proactive and personalized customer support, thus enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.
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Gen AI’s integration within BPM is poised for a transformative leap. The steam engine freed up human and animal muscle power. This time, Gen AI will free up and unlock cognitive faculties, empowering enterprises to revolutionize their processes. As enterprises embark on this journey, they can take a moment to pause to reflect on a famous quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
This paradigm shift isn’t merely an upgrade; it represents an uncharted frontier. The innovative minds of today will decide how best to harness the power of Gen AI to reimagine and reconstruct the very fabric of Business Process Management.
Disclaimer Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the respective institutions or funding agencies
