There have been numerous studies highlighting the tentative steps being taken with artificial intelligence, with most organizations conducting pilots or doing some form of testing. Whilst a lack of technical skills are widely cited as a barrier holding back wider deployment, so to is a lack of strategic appreciation for the impact AI can have on business as usual.
Deloitte have not been at the forefront of reports in this field, but they’ve teamed up with innovation consultancy Springwise to produce a short paper highlighting a few use cases for deep learning.
The paper focuses purely on sales and marketing and highlights how AI can help to improve everything from decision making to more specifically targeted sales and marketing.
Springwise specialize in finding startups experimenting in new and novel ways, so it’s no surprise that the report highlights a number of interesting examples of AI in action.
For instance, Radius are a startup using AI to provide marketing-related insights to B2B customers. Darwin, meanwhile, support geo-targeted pricing to allow online retailers to better optimize their sales. The authors are unflinching in their belief about the potential for AI to transform business however.
“From improving productivity on large construction projects to helping customers choose the right furniture, machine learning and deep learning technology are being applied to almost every aspect of business and industry,” the authors conclude. “The combination of big data and neural networks is helping to unlock the value of data businesses already have by revealing patterns that they can use to create and improve offerings or productivity, or to gain an advantage over the competition.”
The paper will be familiar ground for those who follow Springwise’s work on a regular basis, but it’s disappointing that a report produced in conjunction with Deloitte offers such slim pickings in terms of actually implementing AI into the workplace. After all, identifying something you think could make an impact is a long way from actually implementing it and scaling it up.
Given the supposed expertise within Deloitte for doing just that, it seems a bit of a missed opportunity for the consultancy to outline what they believe are the best ways for implementing AI into a modern business. As such, it offers nothing that reading the Springwise blog wouldn’t provide you.
