Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 19, 2018 - March 25, 2018

IMAGINE you are running an airline and one of your planes is grounded due to some technical issue. This causes massive delays, cancellations and rescheduling of flights. Disgruntled passengers flood the lines  at your call centre and getting someone from customer service to advise them on the next available flight will probably take at least half an hour.

Now, if you do not want your passengers to hang up because they have to wait too long for a response, or subject them to circuitous interactive voice response (IVR) menus, you could hire 500 customer service operators.

The problem is that they will be sitting around doing nothing unless there is an emergency.

The solution to your problem lies in artificial intelligence (AI).

AI, which has almost infinite scalability, can generate conversational interfaces known as chat robots, or chatbots.

Your passengers can speak to a chatbot like they would to a real person, and AI will be used in the background to search for the relevant information for them.

It seems like such a scenario could still be a little way into the future, but according to AI and advanced analytics expert Gavin Seewooruttun, all these things are possible and we are going to see AI used in some commercial applications from next year.

“If you look at the business-to-consumer industries, be it retail banks, airlines, retailers or telcos, there is always a need to improve customer experience. The priority for them is having enough capacity when things go wrong,” says Seewooruttun, a partner in C3 Business Solutions Pty Ltd (EYC3).

“Every business will follow suit very quickly. We are going to see almost every medium-to-large organisation embark on AI. It is going to be something like how we adopted the internet years ago,” he tells The Edge in an interview.

Similarly, if you were operating a bank or a telco, your customers could ask a chatbot, and it would connect them to whoever it is they have to talk to. This would save customers from the frustration of being passed from one operator to another.

“When customers interact with the IVR, they need to guess what the right option is. Eventually, when you do get through, you are told you have the wrong department, and you will be connected somewhere else. This is an absolute nightmare,” says Seewooruttun. Banks and telcos, he adds, could turn to AI to fix this problem.

Seewooruttun has 15 years behind him in digital strategy, programme execution and technology operations. His experience and global network enables him to help organisations translate innovation into commercial outcomes quickly.

In the last three years, he has delivered eight digital strategies, six data platforms and more than 20 AI and analytics solutions for the clients of professional services giant EY.

EYC3 is an Australia-based data analytics firm representing the data and advanced analytics business of EY in Asia Pacific. It is the result of the 2015 acquisition of C3 Business Solutions, which was itself part of a play by EY to build capability in advanced analytics globally.

 

Big year ahead for AI

Besides banks and telcos, which are mostly in the planning stage of AI adoption, companies in asset-intensive industries such as utilities, mining and resources are also keen to find out how they can use new data to do things better, says Seewooruttun.

“We have seen quite a lot of demand for AI advisory and strategic planning works. We are helping our clients to understand what the opportunities are, which area they could use AI in their businesses, as well as how much value they would get.”

He anticipates 2019 to be a big year for AI as business corporations are ready to invest heavily in acquiring technology in a move to operationalise AI and subsequently, realise its value.

“This is very much similar to what we have seen in big data about three to four years ago. Now, AI is following its path,” he says.

Seewooruttun acknowledges that AI has been a marketing hype in recent years, but what has changed is that now, there is enough data to make AI applications in various industries viable. The data is mostly generated by mobile phones and wearable devices through customer interactions with digital businesses.

“The executives of companies are now talking about AI seriously. Does it mean AI is going to disrupt our industry? Or is that more of a tactical intervention that can provide value? Is this really relevant to us, or should we just ignore it?” he asks.

He says AI technology is already viable today as most of the big data projects that various industries invested heavily in over the last two to three years are now coming to an end.

“Organisations with all that data are wondering what else they can do to monetise it. There is a hunt for the next big thing as many opportunities have yet to be explored.”

 

Purpose-driven, not commercial-driven

Vittorio Furlan, director of Ernst & Young Advisory Services Sdn Bhd, says the best thing about AI is that a lot of jobs will still be there but the “boring” parts will disappear and be replaced by automation or AI, while the “interesting” parts will remain.

“People will then have more time to focus on the creative part and they can get involved in activities that require interaction with other people. That’s the real change we hope to see,” he says.

“That’s the point we should stress to industry. In Malaysia, there is a fear that technological advancement will change society in a bad way, but in fact, it is actually here to help us get a better life,” says Furlan.

Seewooruttun concurs. “When I go to a coffee shop, I go there not just for the coffee, but also for the experience. I want to interact with people in a busy place. You could potentially automate as much as you want, have a robot serve you coffee, but that might go against the purpose of your organisation,” he warns.

Simply put, AI adoption should be purpose-driven, rather than purely cost and commercial-driven.

Meanwhile, Furlan admits that the use of cloud solutions in Malaysia has been relatively limited compared with other parts of the world.

However, we can expect the authorities to relax the regulations to some degree with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, opening its data centre in Malaysia last October.

The data centre is aimed at meeting the surging demand for scalable and cost-effective cloud computing services among enterprises in Southeast Asia.

“Banks and financial service institutions would be able to use the cloud much more than what is done currently. The combination of data and cloud will make Malaysia ready to start big on AI activities,” Furlan says.

 

 

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