HOW AI CAN HELP BUSINESSES BECOME MORE RESILIENT, ESPECIALLY IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY
Introduction
Business resilience can be defined as the strategic foresight, operational agility and innovative capabilities of an organization that allow it to adapt to changing circumstances. If you are a leader feeling overwhelmed by the era of AI disruption instead of seizing upon it as a way to navigate the change, this blog is for you.
How AI can help businesses become more resilient
An organization’s digital maturity directly correlates to how prepared it is to handle disruption. During the height of covid, it was the most tech-savvy restaurants, stores and shipping organizations who were able to quickly pivot their offerings or supply chains to provide their services or products through new channels and delivery systems. Outdated processes, mindsets and technology reduce the agility of a business, and in the era of AI, slow-to-change will likely lead to soon-to-close.
- Improve situational awareness and foresight: AI supports businesses with new ways to collect, process, and analyze large amounts of data (structured and unstructured) from various sources such as customers, competitors, suppliers, regulators, and partners. Leaders are notified sooner where both generators and pain points live because of automated and enhanced tools that identify patterns, tends, anomalies and gaps, meaning scenario exploration and targeted, value-creating use cases focused on either scaling successes or remediating problems can happen earlier in the life cycle.
- Enhance operational efficiency, productivity and agility: AI can help businesses automate and optimize core processes, such as production, distribution, marketing, sales, and customer service. AI solutions that automate reporting and improve communication can yield targeted predictive analytics and recommend proactive responses in the most dynamic of situations. AI-empowered solutions provide leaders with greater ability to anticipate and adapt to demand fluctuations, supply chain disruptions, and even regulatory changes. Basic functionality as simple as automated alerts can trigger everything from proactive maintenance that alleviates a quality control issue to recommendations regarding staffing allocations that respond to signals regarding market demand. These tools augment human performance, not replace it.
- Innovate and create new value: AI is facilitating the design, development, and delivery of new products, services, and solutions across every industry. By capturing and sharing market signals, leaders can more readily identify untapped markets, segments, niches and gaps, or to ideate new business models and revenue streams. Market differentiation and maintaining pulse on competitors are additional outcomes from democratized data that can be more readily reasoned over. Similarly, the rapid reporting and predictive insights that AI is enabling helps anticipate and minimize risks or strategize efficiencies like cost control measures.
- Learn and improve continuously: If your business needs help fostering a culture of learning and experimentation, look no further than AI tools to help democratize data and encourage collaboration. With automated collection of data, greater opportunities to reason over that data, AI-empowered managers are better positioned to evaluate performance, enhance competencies, and implement improvements. These enhanced insights are allowing companies to better learn from successes and failures, developed best practices and benchmarks, and scale improvements across the enterprise.
Conclusion
AI is a powerful tool that can help businesses become more resilient, especially in times of crisis or uncertainty. AI can help businesses improve their situational awareness and foresight, enhance their operational efficiency, productivity and agility, innovate and create new value, and learn and improve continuously. By leveraging AI, businesses can adapt to changing circumstances, recover from disruptions, and continue to deliver value to their customers and stakeholders.
At Escalate Solutions, we help businesses leverage the power of AI and digital transformation to improve performance, resilience, and value. Contact [email protected] today to find out how we can help you achieve your business goals.
GenAI resources were used in the drafting of this article.