M+E Daily

The creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) and bot strategy can help a company improve its business practices, remove mundane tasks and improve the speed and access to information within the enterprise, according to Dennis Helms, innovation and experience lead at LiveTiles.

But because AI has only recently been introduced into the workplace, practical insights on how to implement the technology remains unknown territory for many organizations, according to the company.

“It surprises me that there’s such a high percentage of companies today that actually don’t necessarily have” a plan when it comes to building such a strategy, Helms said May 23, during a breakout session called “Intelligent Transformation: How to Build an AI and Bot Strategy for Your Organization” at the annual HITS Spring event.

Many companies are still “dipping their toe in the proverbial waters of AI and chatbots and things like that, but they don’t really have kind of a plan; it hasn’t really been well thought of” yet, he told attendees.

Coming up with an AI strategy that’s “long-term and sticky within your environment” to drive “intelligent transformation” at the organization should be the goal, he said, describing intelligent transformation as the next step beyond an organization’s digital transformation because it’s adding intelligence.

The “driving force behind AI in the workplace” is the fact that consumers have already embraced the technology in their homes with devices that feature Alexa and Siri, he told attendees. That consumer adoption has “set the standard for what needs to be available from a professional perspective,” he said.

It’s expected that 40% of enterprises will actively be using chatbots this year as part of their business processes, he pointed out. But he conceded they might not all be doing that in a good way. “It depends on how good their plan was,” he said.

Turning to another projection that he called his favorite, he said: “By 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse.”

But the statistic the urged attendees to really focus on is the prediction that, by 2021, more than 50% of enterprises will spend more on bots and chatbot creation than traditional mobile apps across multiple channels, he said, adding: “The moral of that story is get on the train or you’ll be run over by it, more or less.”

There are challenges to implementing AI and bots, especially if an organization isn’t quite ready for it, he conceded. LiveTiles experienced that firsthand, when it created a bot builder 2-3 years ago that could be “rolled out to everybody within an organization” to do a wide variety of things, including book meetings and answer one’s emails, he said.

“We were a little early” there, he admitted, noting the market wasn’t quite ready for such an “unrestricted” bot that would be used by everybody within a company for so many different purposes.

Issues that still must be considered with such technology includes privacy concerns, he noted, adding customer assistance/help center/call center bots have been in strong demand.

LiveTiles has about 100 bots “out there running different use cases” now, he told attendees. About 60% of them are designed to “allow humans to focus on meaningful work” at organizations and move them away from “menial tasks that we all deal with on a regular basis” like scheduling meetings, he said, noting: “It’s not to replace jobs.”

HITS Spring was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by LiveTiles, 5th Kind, Amazon Web Services, Birlasoft, Exactuals, Expert System, MarkLogic, Microsoft Azure, Richey May Technology Solutions, SoftServe, Spark Digital, Avanade, CDSA, Cinelytic, EIDR, MicroStrategy, Signiant, the Trusted Partner Network, human-I-T, and Zaszou IT Consulting.

The event was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA); and the Smart Content Council.

To download audio of the LiveTiles presentation, click here. To download the slide deck, click here.