Impact of COVID-19 on enterprise AI adoption | Tangled AI
COVID-19 had single-handedly brought the world down to its knees, plunging economies and bringing businesses to a screeching halt. Its sudden onset had produced ripples across a wide spectrum of industries. Though sectors such as aviation, tourism, and retail were worst-hit, other industries were also not spared. Companies in each of these sectors are still struggling to go back to their previous levels of operation and maintain a position in the market.
To reach the destination faster and to bring back efficiency in operations, companies are now resorting to advance disruptive technologies such as #artificialintelligence to combat the crisis. Startups and small enterprises are also adopting #ai to grow their business exponentially. As a result of this widespread acceptance, AI has experienced skyrocketing growth in 2020. In a study, it is revealed that nearly 85% of enterprises are either evaluating or using AI in production today. AI is also rampantly adopted by R&D enterprises thereby overtaking all other industries by a wide margin.
The rise of AI
A global study conducted in mid-2020 has revealed that large C-level enterprises are working relentlessly to operationalize AI in their businesses. About 80% of enterprise owners vouch for AI and state that it is going to be the major driving force for their business in the next five years. This is quite understandable too as Covid-19 has demolished every business and the CXOs are left with no choice other than to lay their hands on new technologies like AI to rebuild their business.
There is generally a positive outlook and enthusiasm among businesses in 2020 as there is a sudden surge in AI usage (by 62%) from last year. Even businesses that were not impacted hugely by Covid-19 contributed to this staggering increase in enterprise AI adoption. These businesses wanted to embrace some form of digital transformation to stay relevant in this competitive world and focus on long-term growth.
Increasing the reach of enterprises through AI
Sales and marketing are often considered the primary contributors to the growth and development of businesses. Thanks to AI adoption, this pandemic had shown everyone that businesses can flourish even without real-time interactions. Due to the deprivation of real-time client meetings and travel restrictions, enterprises adopted AI to promote their sales and marketing process digitally. In 2020, about 54% of enterprises and small businesses were expected to adopt AI to accelerate their sales.
AI-powered chatbots and smart email marketing tools were used to attract and engage leads and turn them into potential customers. On top of this, a powerful combination of AI with ML was used to identify potential customer’s behavior through their historical data of purchases. Overall, the use of marketing automation is expected to soar by 104% in the coming days.
Remote work made easy
With enterprises asking most of their employees to work from the comfort of their homes, tracking the employees’ performance became an arduous task. Also, a fading work-life balance started to wreak havoc in the employer-employee relationship in most companies. AI helped to counter both these issues. Some AI systems could intelligently gauge the performance of every individual along with their contribution towards the growth of the company.
A few AI tools even helped the businesses to automate administrative work such as scheduling meetings and sending it to the right set of employees over the mail. X.ai, a New York-based startup enterprise has created a personnel assistant bot called Amy which is capable of arranging meetings and contacting all the participants.
Also, errors and technical glitches in a remote working environment are inevitable. Instead of employing a technical support team, AI has enabled businesses to leave the troubleshooting to employees, thereby saving cost and time. With the help of an AI technical support team, employees can solve the technical issues from their homes. A classic example of an AI troubleshooting support tool is Wipro Holmes. It has a real-time #aibot to answer your queries and take you through the troubleshooting process.
Affordable AI
Ever since the pandemic struck, enterprises were in pursuit of reducing capital costs while also improving their revenues. AI turned out to be a cost-efficient mechanism to support their efforts. Research by Accenture has revealed that two-thirds of enterprises are planning to invest in AI in 2020. They are also expecting that it will boost their revenues by at least 30% in the next four years. With transportation costs and catering costs drastically reduced, early adoption of AI would further bring down the capital costs and boost revenue. Experts believe that this was also one of the primary reasons why enterprises quickly adopted AI as soon as the pandemic hit.
AIaaS-Artificial Intelligence as a service
SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS are the common services that the world is aware of. But AIaaS(Artificial Intelligence as a service) is not as popular as the other three but has gained huge popularity during the Covid era. It is simply a third party offering AI services. It also offers subsets of AI such as machine learning, deep learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing) services to enterprises. After the advent of Covid-19, AIaaS services has been forecasted to grow by 45%, reaching 34.1 billion USD by 2027. AIaaS is also offering services to cloud enterprises to generate more revenue and optimize the processes. In just one year, AIaaS has begun to take the world by storm.
Also contrary to the popular belief, AIaaS is cost-efficient and offers the best infrastructure services at a fraction of cost. These are perfect for small enterprises who are just beginning to adopt AI.
Final Thoughts
Although the proportion of AI adopting enterprises has not been satisfactory in the past few years, it all changed with the onset of the pandemic. The need for AI adoption is booming and enterprises are looking for AIaaS to bolster their business growth. Nearly 79% of executives in enterprises believe that AI adoption helps to make their work efficient and are looking forward to learning AI technologies in the coming days. On top of it, AI is backed up by its subsidiary technologies such as deep learning, machine learning, and big data, all of which complements it and expands its uses in an enterprise. In summary, this pandemic has shown the world that a major digital transformation is the need of the hour and has clearly highlighted the need for #aiadoption.
