In the fast paced world businesses currently operate in, it has become increasingly critical to be able to deliver lightning fast results, coupled with precision. Technology, in this context, is a crucial enabler, as it has proved capable of opening up a world of opportunity. Businesses have inevitably increased their reliance on technology manifold, and are constantly on the lookout for the next cutting edge solution, to create market differentiation. While disruptive tech has in fact propelled the growth of new marketplaces entirely, i.e. the ecommerce space, most organizations have undergone significant transformation to embrace technology to cater to current market dynamics.

Today, we are spiralling onward to the next level of tech empowerment with the likes of Robotics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence creating possibilities that enable businesses to adopt a more nimble framework. The industry is investing heavily in the automation and artificial intelligence space, as it possesses the capability to dramatically improve productivity while also reducing the propensity for errors. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2017 confirms this trend stating that the investment into artificial intelligence is now 10 times higher than it was five years ago. Thus, driving rapid advances in the domain.

As these technologies continue being developed specifically to align with an organization’s or industry’s business goals, they present truly innovative propositions. For instance, Intelenet Global Services (IGS) iFare™ tool, developed in house and targeted at the travel and hospitality sector,  has a distinctive capability of retrieving airline ticketing fare rules across multiple global distribution systems (GDS) and websites. Additionally, the tool is able to communicate across multiple GDS’ to retrieve PNR details, fare rules, basis applicable conditions, charges or refunds due post amendment or cancellation. Thereby eventually eliminating the time that is spent in toggling, reading conditions, manually calculating the charges/refunds due, etc. This automation is achieved through natural language processing (NLP), where morphological segmentation is undertaken, i.e. break paragraphs into sentences, and sentences into sections of text by matching on end of lines, special keywords and other taxonomies to automatically summarize and then analyse this summary to retrieve the data appropriately. This has resulted in a 50 % reduction in retail losses on account of automated fare calculation.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be a true game changer in the context of customer relationship management as well. Such tools possess capabilities to effectively assess customer preferences through deep-analytical prowess, and are hence able to provide valuable insights into a customer’s behaviour. This creates a platform for more meaningful engagements which are less intrusive in nature. From an organizational perspective, embedding AI into core business functions enables a higher-degree of automation, thereby boosting the overall productivity and performance. One of the most crucial aspects of embedding AI and automation effectively into the systems/processes is to ensure that the experts brought in for this upgrade not only possess adequate knowledge about the tools involved, but most importantly have an in-depth understanding of the domain / industry. Only then would organizations be able to successfully identify AI opportunities and adopt the appropriate AI solutions.