The Business Value of AI Recap

The Business Value of AI held conversations on how to strategically integrate AI to produce higher ROI on November 13 in New York. With support from IBM , expert leaders and industry executives shared their insights on determining how AI implementation transforms the customer experience and business practices. 

Procter & Gamble ’s Seth Cohen joined Bloomberg News ’ Lisa Mateo to discuss how they’ve fostered data science and leveraged AI technologies to increase efficiency for business processes, especially on the sales end. 

While sharing their determination in insourcing talent for data science, Cohen said,

“A data scientist is good when they know the models; they're great when they know the domain."

He then shared how AI enables sales people to receive detailed analytics on SKUs and opportunities for performance boosts in each store rather than having to manually check every product.

Watch the discussion here.

AI calls for transformations in customer service operations. Bank of America ’s Hari Gopalkrishnan , Kroger ’s Jody Kalmbach and American Express ’ Ravi Radhakrishnan sat down to talk about how their companies ease customers into AI-powered services and increase customer satisfaction. 

Gopalkrishnan shared the success they’ve seen with their virtual assistant Erica saying, "7 years ago we launched Erica. We now have 2 billion transactions on Erica." Integrating natural language models and basing conversations on predictive insights give customers a better experience with banking. 

Kalmbach equated AI adoption with both customer and worker success,

"We are working to automate as many of those [repeatable processes] as possible, and what happens when you do that is you transform both the efficiency of the company...but you also enhance the job."

Radhakrishnan shared American Express' customer service vision and which areas they focus on injecting AI into by saying,

"This is technology-powered relationship servicing as we call it."

Watch the panel here.

IBM and Dun & Bradstreet recently partnered to combine cutting-edge watsonx AI technology with the security of a data cloud holding over a half a billion companies. As AI advances, businesses need to make the transition for clients and customers as smooth as possible.

Dun & Bradstreet's Gary Kotovets explained how educating customers on AI capabilities led to more efficient business and results stating,

"As we started to engage and talk to customers, we realized that we had to change...and really make it more about the education of GenAI." 

Watch the conversation here.

In what ways can AI improve productivity, performance and profit margins? PepsiCo ’s Magesh Bagavathi and JLL ’s Yao Morin, Ph.D. discussed the ways in which their companies utilize digitization. 

Rather than seeing AI as a barrier, Morin redefines the perspective as, "It's an enhancer, not a replacer." 

Magesh furthers the call to adapt with innovation by admitting, "In order to make something fundamental out of it [AI], we've actually gone through a pretty significant organizational change as well." To best utilize its abilities, PepsiCo created an AI taskforce and had to build up confidence in AI applications just as they did when the cloud was introduced. 

Watch the discussion here.

Verizon Consumer’s Sowmyanarayan Sampath sat down with Bloomberg Intelligence ’s Mandeep Singh, CFA to detail how he implements the latest technologies while keeping the customer experience in focus. 

He described how incorporating AI into call centers superseded customer satisfaction expectations. By analyzing customers by plan, interests and past interactions, AI can direct incoming calls to certain departments and employees to increase conversation success. The addition of AI’s real-time conversation guidance depending on language indicators also lessens negative customer-worker interactions.

Watch the conversation here.

Thank you to our sponsor IBM for making these conversations and networking sessions possible. Watch all streamed content via the Bloomberg Live YouTube channel and learn more about Bloomberg Live Experiences here.