By: Anil Bansal, Deputy Head-Digital Integration Practice, LTI

Evolution is part of being human, and today we live in a world, where we have progressed and taken a big leap towards what was termed as Information Age. In yet another process of radical paradigm change, the world is getting ready to imbibe a revolution, which is facilitated by Artificial Intelligence. There are many domains, industries and verticals where artificial intelligence has proven its worth and continues to do so.

Information technology armed with artificial intelligence is determined to ease out human living. Hence, ranging from creating personal assistants to conversation bots, 3D printing to medical diagnostics, IoT to self-driven cars, gaming to augmented virtual reality, voice recognition to image analytics, understanding social media trends to targeted decision making, data security to fraud detection; AI is enabling us to plunge in next generation.

Support systems typically are specific to different domains and industries. However, let’s talk about few of the common use cases where artificial intelligence could largely benefit. For example, in a large support system, there could be a huge database of existing support tickets. Every time, a new issue/ticket is raised, it could be immensely helpful to search for some similar issues raised earlier. This could provide a readymade solution and also bring in consistency in the responses. We can argue that even an experienced human should be able to extract similar tickets from the database, but let’s think again when we are talking about few million existing tickets and cost of experienced employees. Artificial intelligence has researched algorithms to classify similar information based on certain key features into pre-defined buckets, and help resolve the problem described above much faster and easier.

Now let’s try to see a little more complex issue. Typically, the advantage of any system comes if it is able to improve itself, which can be done with some concrete action points. Artificial intelligence can help in analyzing the data, say for example, tickets raised against IT application failures. This analysis could quantify the failure rate, could predict the downtime, could pre-empt the maintenance activities, could monitor on a regular basis, and could also self-heal itself in some cases using automation.

Support systems are the backbones of any revenue generating business. Typically, they are seen as overhead and not given enough importance. With artificial intelligence, the support systems can generate very pertinent information that can help in decision making at an executive level. To name a few, what could be the contractual agreement done with a client given the predicted frequency of maintenance activities required; what kind of optimization techniques could be used to bring in lean processes and what would be the cost savings.

Artificial intelligence could also step in for contact center use case, where instead of call center employees, the interaction could be done by trained virtual agents, which are pre-trained to common customer questions and facilitate consistency in quality responses to the clients. On one hand, it could reduce costs and improve efficiency; on the other hand, it can improve customer engagement and loyalty.

Having said what is mentioned above, I would like to emphasize that artificial intelligence has stepped in to fill in our existing shoes, so that we can put in efforts to design wings and fly.