The process of creating AI-based solutions can seem overwhelming for many companies. It’s not uncommon for us to hear organizations say they’ve struggled with where to even begin their journey to becoming an AI-powered business. Adding to their confusion is a wide spectrum of AI-based solutions already in the market, and mountain-sized expectations to show meaningful progress in an area that many consider to be the most promising and disruptive technology shift ever. Couple that with an ever-evolving technology landscape and an AI “Hype Factor” that is off the charts, and many companies are left spinning their wheels with little to show for their efforts.
But fear not! Advances in technology and, more importantly, how to apply these capabilities effectively in the enterprise are actually allowing organizations to realize the benefits of AI quickly. In fact, at Atrium we believe you can become an AI-powered business in less than 90 days.
But what actually qualifies an organization as an “AI-powered business”, and how can yours become one? It goes well beyond just building a predictive model or machine learning algorithm. Instead, it is when those solutions can be scaled across your business to deliver meaningful outcomes that you actually have a true AI-powered business. Case in point – even the most well-crafted AI algorithm has little value if it can’t impact your business on a broader scale.
The good news is that deriving meaningful value from AI capabilities at scale can be achieved very quickly. At Atrium, we see three key tenets for becoming an AI-powered business in less than 90 days.
- Identify Quick-Hitting, High-Impact Use Cases – Many companies have in-house data science teams that are focused on highly complex, big-ticket custom AI solutions. Not surprisingly, these teams often struggle with time to value based on the complexity they are tackling. Outside of these highly complex initiatives exists a whole world of “low hanging fruit” use cases that can have a tremendous impact on your business. More and more companies are using Salesforce.com to address these quick-hitting yet high-impact use cases while their data science teams focus on more complex initiatives. Use cases like Opportunity Scoring, Customer Churn, and Lead Scoring are perfect candidates for delivering significant value quickly. Finding ways to prioritize end-user work within the traditional CRM process footprint can rapidly improve win-rates and customer retention on a large scale.
- Utilizing Predictive Insight to Take Action – Generating an AI model or predictive insight is only half the battle. Taking that insight and exposing it in the workflow of the business to drive different behaviors is ultimately where the magic happens. It’s nearly impossible to be an AI-powered business if your model sits siloed off from the rest of the business where your teams collaborate and work. Again, platforms like Salesforce.com excel at taking these insights and presenting them as recommended actions to a broad audience in your business.
- Architect for Sustainability – Now let’s assume that you’ve built a great model for predicting whether a customer will renew a subscription. And let’s say you’ve deployed that model to your customer service agents in the form of a recommended list of those to proactively reach out to in the hopes of reducing customer churn. That’s fantastic! But how do we ensure that this customer churn model remains effective over time? It’s important to recognize that nearly every machine learning model has a half-life. They almost all degrade over time. As your business changes and you introduce new products, services or strategies into your organization the accuracy of your initial model will begin to decline over time. At Atrium, we’ve developed a set of pre-packed diagnostic tools on the Einstein platform to identify when algorithms need to be tuned. Monitoring “The Area Under The Curve”, a statistical measurement for prediction accuracy, helps ensure your models stay intelligent over time. And when your models remain intelligent, they continue to deliver value back to your organization.
Using these three tenets, Atrium can chart the path for your organization to become an AI-powered business in less than 90 days.
