Artificial Intelligence has evolved from academic interest to drive social, economic, and business changes in the last sixty years. AI is transforming every industry – medical imaging, driverless cars, industrial automation, personalized experience, and many more. But the common assumption is that AI can replace human labor. AI can guide us through many activities in our life. But, it seems that it discounts human creativity.
For businesses to succeed, there is an evolution in the human design and innovation processes augmented by technology. Across different industries, many opportunities are emerging for AI, introducing innovations to augment human abilities. Augmented intelligence is the new conceptualization of AI that assists in advancing human design and innovation capabilities.
Augmented Intelligence – The New Assistive Role of AI
Augmented intelligence, decision support, machine augmented intelligence, or the cognitive enabler leverage people and AI working collaboratively to enhance cognitive performance.
In simple terms, augmented intelligence uses machine learning, NLP, and predictive analytics to analyze data and amplify human intelligence rapidly. The human-centric approach combines AI and human judgement in decisions, and human intelligence always considered alongside AI.
As per the Allied Market Research report, the global augmented intelligence market will reach $121.5bn by 2030. The Covid-19 pandemic and Russia and Ukraine war are sudden unexpected events that have recently impacted businesses. Augmented intelligence would let humans contribute to predictions that may not be valid with historical data under such circumstances.
The Benefits
In 2020, Bluedot, a SaaS company, leveraged augmented intelligence powered by NLP and ML to spot Covid before the WHO. A simple proactive augmented intelligence risk identification with the public health data, demographics, travel, and others helped the world to understand the spread of Covid-19.
Level up innovation
We already see that technology plays a significant role in innovation and business transformation. Augmented intelligence supposedly improves the impact of AI and amplifies human innovation. For example, augmented intelligence automates the data management process like labeling and structuring. It can accelerate the insights while ensuring the data quality as humans are still in the loop.
Enhanced Creativity
As many industry leaders point out, we are in a knowledge economy where we tend to leverage human skills for better purposes. Mundane and repeated task automation with AI and ML is part of the creative transformation that businesses currently pursue. It leaves more room for innovation and creative work where AI is complementary to human creativity.
Transformation with Augmented Intelligence
Retail – Transforming operations with shifting customer needs
The retail industry is constantly under transformation. The demand patterns varied significantly during the pandemic and now with the inflation. How do retailers maintain the supply chain intact and not show out-of-stock displays?
With augmented intelligence, retailers can estimate the customer needs more precisely and thereby estimate their inventories.
Consider Walmart and Target; they leverage data to predict the demand through each channel – online, pick-up, and in-store. Based on the expected volume of orders, they also manage to stock their inventory and allocate workforce.
Other retailers who face such scenarios through multiple channels can efficiently leverage these forecasting methodologies to predict their future sales.
Customer support – Always available with a plethora of knowledge
Customers no longer prefer to wait to address their concerns. Tools like chatbots, digital assistants, and language translation have made it easier to interact with anyone at any time.
Augmented intelligence tools translate to any preferred language within seconds. Customers can improve interactions by easily converting voice to text with virtual assistants. All the search engines and major customer touch points seem equipped with these virtual assistants.
Conversational AI has taken customer support to a different level. It drives efficiencies and improves customer experience by answering the relevant queries in seconds.
Financial Services – Customer acquisition, retention, and service made simple
Banks and financial institutions are under constant pressure to acquire and retain customers as they face stiff competition from fintech companies. Bundling the products and cross-sell for existing customers is also a daunting task.
With augmented intelligence, banks can generate insights like customer lifetime value and customer 360-degree analysis to understand their customer better. Also, banks and financial institutions still operate on a lot of paperwork. With augmented intelligence, they can analyze these documents in minutes to provide an instant loan approval or advise the customers about different products.
Citigroup leveraged augmented analytics for data analysis to optimize its promotional spending.
Healthcare – Patient experience with optimized operations
Healthcare is rapidly shifting to a patient-centric care model. The unnecessary spending on the diagnosis and tests needs cross-checking to optimize spending. Patient care outcomes are critical to improving care providers’ bottom line while enhancing the patient experience.
Augmented intelligence can improve healthcare workflows and accelerate the diagnosis process. It also paves the way for personalized care management plans. Moreover, it plays a vital role in medical imaging, such as the early detection of a few chronic diseases.
Manufacturing – Smart operations with IoT intelligence
Industry 4.0 is an impetus for the adoption of IoT in manufacturing. But the shift may not be beneficial unless manufacturers leverage the data from these devices and sensors equipped through the production process and supply chain.
It is not only about the changes with Industry 4.0 but also about workforce experience. The workforce that is not tech-savvy can plan their work with smart calendars. Also, the reports, dashboards, and charts have automated task lists, making them much more manageable. Gmail today suggests the text for your email and auto-corrects it.
Augmented intelligence helps manufacturers analyze equipment maintenance, overall plant availability, product tracking, logistics timings, and inventory availability. It is not just about efficiencies but also about productivity and customer service.
Telecom – Targeted marketing and personalization to reduce churn
The Telecom industry is under tremendous pressure with increasing competition from apps like WhatsApp. But they already have loads of data from the customer usage patterns to value-added services and business operations. The consumption patterns are rapidly changing, too, as young users prefer to consume content online and stay social.
With augmented intelligence, telecom service providers can analyze the data to bundle the offers according to consumption patterns. Targeted marketing also becomes easy if they analyze the customer needs and touchpoints.
Another significant issue in the industry is to reduce customer churn. Telcos can reduce it by analyzing various factors like cost of services, usage trends, demographics, and spending patterns.
We just provided a glimpse of what augmented intelligence can do. Do you want to know more? Get in touch with our experts for more info.