Building An AI-Powered Organization To Solve Today’s Business Problems

Many organisations have been using technology like artificial intelligence for some time now to transform their businesses, but the current pandemic has created more urgency for companies to automate and innovate. During these uncertain and ever-changing times, business leaders are looking at AI to help them optimize their business processes, increase productivity, and improve customer service.

This week I tuned into Microsoft’s virtual AI Summit, where they shared their vision of empowering organizations with AI throughout their entire structure. The “How to build an AI-powered organization” keynote given by Corporate VP of AI and Innovation Marketing, Mitra Azizirad, highlighted many successful AI projects that are already underway, and looked towards a future where AI-driven automation is an everyday part of our business lives.

Like so many other events, Microsoft’s summit on AI for business leaders was an entirely digital event. This fits well with another key message of the event – that now, more than ever, we must look to technology and innovation for both solving old problems better, and for dealing with emerging challenges going forward.

Due to the ongoing health crisis, Azizirad found herself in the novel situation of giving a keynote to an audience of industry leaders from a spare bedroom of her house. As we approach three months into lockdown in the UK where I’m writing this, novel situations have quickly become the “new normal” in this, and many other ways. The spirited response to change seen across most industries speaks volumes about our capacity to adapt and innovate – particularly when it is a matter of survival.

Azizirad shares that the whole ethos behind Microsoft’s drive to “put AI into the hands of everyone is about helping businesses and organizations to meet that potential and to drive holistic change. I am not surprised by her excitement for her brief – which is to discover the amazing advances that are becoming possible through AI and innovation, and to help her customers make it work for them. As this also describes a great deal of the work I do, I know it is a privilege to have a front-row view of the power of this technology.

Azizirad talked a little more about the Covid-era challenges such as managing remote working and keeping teams and customers connected. A great example here is the work her team has done with the “virtual stage” technology. This uses AI to enable presenters to drop into any background and smoothly interact with computer graphic elements of the presentation. By combing a new neural network background matting technique with depth information captured by two Azure Kinect cameras, it is possible to create a green screen experience without a green screen. The team made the code and instructions available via an AI Lab for developers to help business leaders replicate the experience themselves.

One question I hear regularly when I talk about AI is that with so many other priorities pressing, is there a danger that people might start to look away from advanced tools and platforms, seeing them as “nice-to-haves” rather than survival essentials?

Azizirad’s message was that this isn’t likely to happen. AI is already providing real growth in three key areas – operations, employee productivity and customer services – essential to bottom-line growth and therefore long-term survival. For customer services in particular, it’s unlikely that companies would have managed the successful response they have seen to changes that Covid-19 has caused to the way customers communicate, without this technology being available. Microsoft’s own Health Bot system is used across 23 countries to allow organizations (including governments) to query health data and provide answers to customers and the general public.

Mitra also touched on the gains that are being seen by businesses experimenting with automation to reduce manual and repetitive digital workloads such as data cleansing and preparation. According to Azizirad’s figures this has often led to a 25% increase in employee productivity – leaving more time free to work on strategic or creative priorities.

Another interesting point discussed was a concept referred to as MLOps – or Machine Learning Operations. Taking its cue from software development’s DevOps, MLOps looks towards a near-future scenario when AI adoption within companies will scale to allow thousands of processes all working simultaneously on their own tasks, but constantly learning and growing with each other.

“The ability to integrate AI into the fabric of your business is what is going to accelerate the value you get from the technology – and where we see the leaders differentiate from those that are struggling”, Azizirad shares.

To me, this seems to open up the possibility of new roles emerging within companies, bridging the gap between management’s big visions and the ability and domain expertise of the technical specialists needed to implement them.

In any worthwhile discussion of AI there are risks that need to be addressed, and generally, these revolve around privacy, security and bias. Mitigating against these risks must be a strategic priority, with remedies hard-baked into tools and processes, Azizirad says, and I can see that this is likely to become an important part of the MLOps workload.

To help other business drive AI, Microsoft created the AI Business School, an initiative aimed at equipping non-technical business leaders with AI smarts, along with the knowledge and skills they need to provide responsible AI leadership.

This month, the school added two new learning pathways to its curriculum. One is focused on scaling AI as well as the MLOps concept previously discussed. The other, AI for Business Users, tackles application of AI to typical and not-so-typical business problems.

You can watch Mitra Azizirad’s full keynote on-demand, and you can find more information on Microsoft’s AI Business School here.

Have more questions about how to build an AI powered organization? Then watch out for when Mitra will join me for a LinkedIn Live session later in July.

Thank you for reading my post. Here at LinkedIn and at Forbes I regularly write about management and technology trends. I have also written a new book about AI, click here for more information. To read my future posts simply join my network here or click 'Follow'. Also feel free to connect with me via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Slideshare or YouTube.

About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchains, and the Internet of Things.

LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that reaches millions of readers.

For more on AI and technology trends, see Bernard Marr’s book Artificial Intelligence in Practice: How 50 Companies Used AI and Machine Learning To Solve Problems and his forthcoming book Tech Trends in Practice: The 25 Technologies That Are Driving The 4Th Industrial Revolution, which is available to pre-order now.