AI Advantages & Challenges In Corona Virus Era

 
The COVID19 changed everything in the world with the jet speed that no one has imagined so far. The eruption made forced isolation that has shifted conferences & activities to go on through web alliance tools.
And most importantly, the virus has grounded the entire flora and fauna to an arrest. For some industries, it is a significant setback, but some sectors like media and tech are not that much affected.
Negative side is easily exposed compared to positive, but businesses & public sector leaders are forced to think about the forced silver lining. Not only to survive this downfall but how they can come back more reliable & more resilient from the rubble.
At USM, we mainly concentrate on research that involves tracking AI and innovation things across various sectors, dialling into where AI is driving ROI, which we do via our AI opportunity research.
In these tough times, we are expecting many AI startups to fade away and many technology priorities within large enterprises to completely shift to be more in line with what we are going to be.
In this article, we can discover the advantages and challenges companies experiencing during this Corona-virus pandemic.

• Strategy reassessment

The organization that stood strong in this crisis from a stance of AI applications & projects will need to assess their existing strategies. In this type of crisis, all strategies need to be re-assessed, and what was yesterday a differentiator for the next two years may fall by the wayside.
AI involves too much fundamental change to apply haphazardly to non-priority areas of business. While Investing in AI, you must have focus with aligned strategy.

• AI readiness

Once the strategy planning is done at least up to the tertiary level, then the team can imagine where they are up to in terms of AI readiness around their most important data. In these kinds of situations, organizations need to determine strategic preferences and determine their availability as it pertains to these principal trusts, which are receiving funding and funds.
Once a company is good at the understanding of the strategy and readiness, they can consider AI projects and initiatives. There will be two significant business preferences that take precedence during the pandemic:

1. Business evolution/AI transformation
2. Risk mitigation

A firm must opt for AI application, which isn’t merely defensive, but that offers promise for future advantage.
Now, we are going to look after both kinds of AI initiatives to help leaders think through what applications might be relevant for them.

• Businesses evolution in the Corona-virus era

While many companies will exclusively focus on decreasing the risk while dealing with the crisis, many companies that are seeing their supply chains & customer needs changing radically will need to think about business evolution & how to overcome this crisis.

• Evolution of retail

Retail companies will have to pivot to eCommerce as long as the world remains in quarantine. They may focus on improving or making a recommendation engine to help their online customers find items they like and increase cart value.
The firms can also focus on enhancing their digital marketing with AI. Some AI vendors offer software that can suggest site layout modifications automatically to increase conversion rate and brand loyalty like Evolv.

Recommend: What AI can do for the retail industry?

• Evolution of logistics

Logistics companies will double down on prediction, although it may be tough to start collecting the information or data for such an AI project in such an unusual and uncertain time.
Companies that are using some sort of predictive technology or have been collecting digital data on their load times, costs, and many other factors may be able to leverage predictive analytics software.
Approximately 23% of the AI vendors in logistics companies offer products for supply chain risk management, which may be imperative for planning for the next national emergency. And 28% of AI vendors provide products for supply and demand prediction that also account for 19% of the AI-related funding in the sector.
Such an application is very much important in this type of situation because of customer buying behavior fluctuates during this period.

Recommend: AI in the transportation industry

• Evolution of financial services

Most of the financial service companies are very well pivot to improving the customer experience because people are unable to walk into their local branch at this particular time.
Chatbots is one of the solutions for the current problem because most of the top financial institutions and banks have put press releases about their Chatbots over the past few years.
According to the reports, as of 2019, Chatbots made up approximately 49% of the AI products at large financial institutions, but only 5.5% of the AI-related venture funding in the financial service industry.
The above stats indicate that large financial institutions are talking about Chatbots often; they and venture capitalists that know the industry aren’t putting their money in conversation interfaces.
The situation may change as financial service customers need a shift in response to the virus, but regardless customer service is likely where financial institutions will be looking to focus. If Chatbot is not a solution, then they may go for call center automation.

Recommend: The Power Of AI & ML Technologies In Banking & Financial Sector

• Risk Mitigation

Most organizations are not focusing on keeping themselves afloat during this pandemic situation. It may keep hold other a lot of different initiatives and bring any kind of risk lessening to the forefront of the businesses, which has consequences for both AI startups and fortune companies.

• Enterprises

Enterprises depending on AI, they will be looking for low hanging-fruit more than ever. The most straightforward risk mitigations applications are those that can take a limited no of primary information sources that are already reasonably harmonized & detect anomalies in that data in a meaningful way that enables companies to save a lot of money.
Just take a simple example; there are some problems within the logistics industry around predicting inventory that may entail different sources of information or data about the transportation of products or goods. The storage of goods different kinds of products and items being stored in various locations as well as inventory data.
Being able to harmonize and merge all of those various kinds of data to find patterns among them all requires a considerable amount of digital transformation that most companies simply haven’t done yet.

• Low-hanging fruit: Friendly fraud finding

Friendly fraud detection refers to when a customer buys something and then says that it was made as a fraudulent transaction so that they can keep the product and get their money back. Detecting involves a relatively simple set of data that is already in some sort of digital configured.
So long as a company files what someone purchased, how they bought it. Who purchased it and how long it was later that they issued a chargeback, the company is likely able to perceive the deceitful activity.
Because of this, firms are better able to not only prevent high-risk payments from coming through in the first place but also they can successfully defending and reducing chargeback’s altogether by directly detecting patterns in an already digitized set of data.
We expect these low-hanging fruit anomaly detection & pattern recognition problems in unlike corners of the enterprise, to be where many actions are in AI at this time

• Startups

AI startups need to be ready to solve the immediate problem with the help of their value proposition. They must talk with the customers and determine the critical issues that are most dreadful for them.
Startups may require to turn their technology offering or the way they deliver their service based on these latest requirements. Some companies will be required to pivot & sell to entirely different departments or businesses, perhaps even diverse markets if they are unable to find a strong match for instant problems.
Enterprises are not showing interest in doing business with AI startup companies to solve such existing issues. They are opting for a well-established service provider for solving and handling a known problem.
But there is feather advantage of being companies that large enterprise companies believe that they can do it and help drive success in the coming up future.
So, it is very crucial for the organizations that modify or re-frame their contribution also to frame their offering, not just as a bandaid for today’s problem.
Startups need to ask some questions themselves:

• How my company services are going to affect their basic operations or things?
• What is the new thing that I am selling within the business?
• How our services help them to accelerate, a benefit for the people who depend on our technologies over those of competitors?

Currently, in the market, most of the vendors are not capable of re-framing their offerings as something that helps with instant problems; for such companies, it will be the last lapse of the ride.
The startups need to get lean and focus more on long-term fruits that will turn up into sales when companies can be thought about something other than the Corona-virus.

• Final words

I think this is the first more of the data scientists are entering into this workforce than ever. For the first time in history, Ph.D. AI graduates from top institutions and schools may not get job offers they are expecting as soon they graduate
While most of the new tech talent is still working for big companies, many of them also blend into the workforce of organizations as a part of innovations & resiliency hard work.
Non-technical leaders are capable of growing business with rapid speed. They can be heads of innovations & strategy, functional business leaders, and heads of various departments, who play the crucial role in navigating their same business context and finding the critical innovation areas on which to multiply to come out on the other side of the Coronavirus pandemic with top market share and a better foundation than ever before.
Is your business affected by this pandemic situation and looking out for the solution to turn this negative vibe into a positive one?
If so, reach us.
USM AI expert’s research team will help you in providing the right solution.