How AI Translates to ROI

Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming nearly every industry. Almost daily, advances in machine learning are revolutionizing marketing, customer service, analysis, logistics, and more.

AI reduces workloads and increases response times. It is finding subtle relationships hidden in mountains of complex data and revealing possibilities we never thought possible.

The benefits of AI –with measurable ROI– are clear: more can be accomplished with fewer people. AI increases capacity and capability while freeing people from spending time on menial tasks and crunching information. More importantly, AI increases insights into clients, employees, and your industry.

This stretches from supply chain planning to analyzing the tone of customer emails. Machine learning finds training gaps across thousands of workers.

Customer service chat technology can respond to multiple inquiries simultaneously at levels of product and process knowledge beyond human performance. These tools also gather new data to constantly improve the quality of service. As the technology advances, interactive AI becomes increasingly effective and outperforms humans on many basic tasks.

This all translates to efficiency, growth, and reduced costs — a formula for significant ROI. Even if the effort to integrate an AI system into your business is substantial, the benefits over time are undeniable. We can examine this from a variety of perspectives:

• Manufacturing environments can be made more efficient and avoid costly downtime. AI has been used to modify manufacturing lines to be more efficient by eliminating wasted movement of materials and combining manufacturing steps. Production lines instrumented with IoT sensors generate the data required for AI to predict outages before they occur, allowing for planned maintenance cycles.
• Improved response times and detailed, automated customer service translates to a more consistent and informative customer experience that generates loyalty and increased lifetime customer value.
• More efficient systems for shipping, supply chain, inventory management, and automatic ordering all serve to reduce losses, better predict sales trends, and make sure you always have the appropriate supplies, materials, and products on hand. This reduces human error and effort and saves money by avoiding overstocking. Maintaining a more accurate inventory means being able to process orders more consistently.
• AI helps sales staff generate and qualify leads, sifts through tremendous amounts of employee data –such as feedback, performance metrics, and internal communication– helping to determine which staff members are best suited for certain responsibilities. This reduces turnover, improves performance, as well as helps identify risks and problem areas, resulting in a better business that retains customers, attracts top talent, and is more profitable.
• AI-based image recognition systems are outperforming clinicians for an increasing rage of medical conditions. Recently, an AI system detected cancerous moles at 90% accuracy, besting clinicians who perform below 84%. The system concurrently reduced the reporting of false positives as well. Many other areas of healthcare are seeing AI driven improvements.

ROI can be calculated solely on time/wages saved. For example, if you look at the hourly wage of a person staffing a help desk, an AI chatbot is far more cost-effective in the long term. You don’t have to pay the chatbot a wage, it doesn’t take days off, and is able to handle more work in less time. It does take time to develop and comes with the upfront costs of implementation, but over time AI can handle basic requests better than an entire team of humans.

This can be seen as AI replacing jobs. A more progressive view is that it is improving jobs many people already do. These systems need people to train and monitor them, and complex issues will still need to be escalated to a real live person.

Instead of replacing jobs, AI makes jobs more interesting, more fulfilling, and allows individuals to work with greater capacity. In terms of ROI, this means happier, more capable employees with higher job satisfaction and more sophisticated skills.

AI is changing the world. Companies implementing these systems are realizing immediate returns while concurrently increasing competitive advantage. Significant ROI is already being realized across numerous aspects of business, rapidly becoming a standard in every industry. It’s an investment in your future that will transform the way you operate.

The returns on AI investments are far more than financial.