A wave of automation has already reshaped our industrial landscape. From car assembly plants to aerospace our world is changing and is about to experience another tsunami of change as Big Data becomes a feedstock for increasingly powerful and smarter artificial intelligence.
Studies by IBM reveal 90 percent of all data created within the last 24 months. This deluge of data comes courtesy of the explosion in mobile devices, social media and The Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with seismic changes in data storage and computing power. Smart machines or technologies with intelligence are pointing to a future where automation includes thinking.
Teaching Your Friendly AI
The reason data storage, computing power, and AI are all so joined at the hip, is currently AI systems require the underlying. AI algorithm to be trained and learn on a sufficiently large scale that the AI can get to the tipping point where it becomes useful.
Former chief scientist of Baidu, Andrew Ng now a professor at Stanford recently cast AI as the “new electricity” in a speech, “By replacing steam-powered machines with those using electricity, we transformed transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare and so on. sformation on many industries.”
The genesis of this revolution lies deep in the inner plumbing of the Internet, in its hosted data centers, networks, and processors. Until comparatively recently, the sheer cost of all the storage and computing power required to train an AI system was exorbitantly expensive. However, these constraints are fast disappearing as technology marches ever onwards.
Changing Nature of Work
One theme that social scientists have been highlighting over the past few years has been the changing nature of work. As automation accelerates the rate of change in offshore outsourcing, finance, and customer service, commentators are fast drawing the conclusion that our economic and social future won’t necessarily feature devastated employment levels, rather AI will channel work down a different path.
These forces are also re-contouring the future face of outsourcing. An entirely new economic sector has been triggered by the growth of the Internet of Things, generating demand for outsourced security monitoring to network management and customer service through to remote storage.
According to Gian Rama, chief executive officer of Innovantage an innovator in artificial intelligence, “Automation will impact business process outsourcing (BPO) companies by eliminating low-level work, but it will also enhance the effectiveness of the human workforce.”
Imagination Remains A Barrier To AI Adoption
While adoption of big-data enabled AI .
Frances Karamouzis, a vice president at Gartner, believes, ess process or their IT process.”
Increasing numbers of companies appear to be arriving at a solution. So, expect to see adoption rates accelerate as the capability to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence begins to reshape outsourcing’s ecosystem over the near and medium term future.
Outsourcing’s Existential Crisis
One confronting challenge for international outsourcing providers is the inevitable erosion of their current price advantage as AI technology evolves and reshapes the commercial landscape. The challenge is, are outsourcing-focused countries, g and emerging, sufficiently agile and nimble to anticipate the coming wave of change? Or, will they rely on simply reacting to market forces rather than re-imagine their business model to exploit AI themselves to compete on a blend of price and service quality.
Karamouzis observes, for the first time in the last 25 years, they’re saying my primary motivation is not buying because something is cheaper. My primary motivation is buying because something is better.”
Outsourcing’s Intertidal Zone
Still, outsourcing is not at the AI event horizon just yet. Over the past two decades, outsourcing has adapted to a series of technological change. As Melissa O’Brien, research director for contact centers and omnichannel operations at HfS Research remarked “Simple automation has been around forever in the contact center, especially for back-end tasks and basic customer routing and interactions with IVRs. O’Brien said, “Now what we’re seeing is a greater desire to make that automation more intelligent and be able to learn from interactions and better augment the agent-level talent.”
Emerging AI technologies are not yet replacing staff. They are initially absorbing lower-level tasks, l staff.
India’s outsourcing giants have seen AI coming down the information autobahn for some years now, and Wipro, Tata Consulting Services, and Infosys are looking to lead the way by investing in creating their interpretation of the shape their future infrastructure will adopt.
AI Enabled Financial Services Outsourcing
The Finance sector has been tiptoeing around big data and AI for some time now. While financial services firms aren’t bravely plunging headlong into a new trading market, there are hot spots where AI cautiously piloted.
A recent Gartner report, “Where Banks Can Use Smart Machines,” listed: “smart” advisors, virtual assistants, security-related processes and natural language processing as potential applications of AI in financial services.
Gartner pointed to finance’s regulatory framework “There are behavioral bounds placed on media that provide financial advice,” the report states. “We do not know how those regulatory, behavioral boundaries impact the emergence of virtual personal financial assistants impact or.”
Nonetheless, the industry continues to search for sources of improvement to its customer service experience together with enhanced efficiency. Using AI enabled systems to automate functions such as verifying information and generating audit trails pose obvious targets for the right combination of technology and pricing. Outsourcing companies active in financial services would be advised to explore potential applications now.
Final Word
As AI evolves and grows smarter, propelled by access to ever-increasing volumes of big data, its decisions will ripple through our economy and social structures. Given by definition, the path AI-driven change will take unclear, even to their most fervent creators. Eric Burgener. The future may not be here just yet, but it is looming on the horizon. Outsourcing need to evaluate how to blend AI with their existing pool of educated, skilled, employees, and do it fast.
– Back Office Pro
