How to improve business processes with AI

You may have noticed that the following words have been repeated more and more often in the business environment lately: Innovation, Cloud and AI.

👉 The first word is “innovation” because every modern company would like to do better, cheaper and more modern.

👉 The second word is “Cloud”, because innovation today can be most quickly deployed using prebuilt and quickly available solutions built in a Cloud environment.

👉 And the third last word is “Artificial Intelligence” or “AI”.

These two letters could also be described as the most discussed topic in IT in the last period. In fact, people have different views on AI – some see it as a revolutionary advancement, others are quite rightly concerned about the potential risks. This is mainly because the introduction of AI will undoubtedly have a key impact on the modern world, just like the invention of the computer, and this is also why its impact will be felt in all areas of business in the near future. Artificial intelligence is therefore becoming a tool that can help solve many problems and also has great potential to create significant advances in enterprise information systems that were unthinkable just a few years ago.

Artificial intelligence can also be imagined today as an army of digital assistants that can do some work instead of humans much faster, more complex and, most importantly, cheaper. AI will therefore be a very useful tool for businesses to reduce costs, improve quality or increase their revenues. Moreover, the introduction of AI will make selected activities faster, cheaper and, above all, more efficient than traditional human performance by enabling them to perform better, helping them to make faster and better decisions and ensuring that the work is carried out with significantly fewer errors.

So how can business gain control of these digital assistants ?

The use of digital helpers in the enterprise using AI has several degrees of automation. It is up to the customer to decide which level they want to start at and what they ultimately want to achieve through automation and the use of AI.

✔️ The first tier is AI assisted, where the actual work is still done by a human, but it is done with the help of AI. Thus, for example, AI can study the entire production documentation, and advise the worker according to the description of the problem to advise a possible solution. The second level of automation is when a human does most of the work and the AI does only part of it. These can be various routine or minor tasks that take up a lot of human time but do not have a high added value.

✔️ The next level of automation is when artificial intelligence does most of the work and only part of the work is done by humans, or AI does most of the work and humans just control and monitor it. Complex solutions can be built on such a principle, which can have a significant impact on the functioning of society, or enable the creation of completely new services and functions that would otherwise not have been possible to implement so far.

✔️ Only the last stage of automation is the full-fledged autonomous work of artificial intelligence without human supervision. It should be noted that it is only this last stage that is currently being so publicised, and probably rightly so, as to cause widespread concern. This is mainly because AI technology is not yet widely used in this stage of automation and the idea that AI will perform complex activities completely independently and especially without human supervision is still difficult for all of us to imagine even today.

The positive news, however, is that these technologies are now realistically available for enterprise information systems and therefore AI-based innovations can start to be used by businesses almost immediately. One of the AI technologies available in this way is the SAP BTP platform. Therefore, nothing prevents us and our BTP.team from gradually introducing such innovative solutions for our customers. However, whether this will also be the last and fully automated AI stage will be up to you and you alone 😊.