“Globally, industries such as retail, e-commerce, healthcare, life sciences, insurance, banking, consumer goods, utilities, telecom, media and direct to consumer services have been increasing their investments in AI over the past decade. Driven by benefits ranging from productivity gains and cost reduction to strategic goals such as deepening customer engagement, finding new ways of growing revenue, expanding into new markets and getting better insights for product development, enterprises are adopting a more strategic approach to how they leverage AI to achieve their business goals,” said Senthil Ramani, Head – Accenture Applied Intelligence for Growth Markets.
While India as a market was trying to understand the applications of Digital, Automation and AI, pandemic spurred the growth of these powerful technologies across all industries. During the pandemic, AI has played a vital role in demand forecasting, supply chain optimization of essential services to healthcare services.
“Our latest research found that 59% of technology leaders accelerated investments in AI and machine learning during the pandemic and 60% in robotic process automation. Scaling up their investments in key technologies including AI during the pandemic has helped leaders not only absorb impact quickly but also refocus on growth. All indications point to a continued investment in this area.” Ramani added.
Pre-Covid, while some businesses were in the early adoption stage, some were just chatting about the technology but today, almost every major organization is automating its process and making its system artificial intelligence.
With work from home, things were moving slowly and so were the business processes. Taking this opportunity, Puneesh Lamba, CTO, Shahi Exports turned a lot of manual run tasks into automated ones.
“We saw that wherever the processes were physical or had manual touch points were either slower now because of the lockdown or not possible at all. So we had to move to virtual processes,” said Lamba.
“The number of processes automated by the company in the last year is much more than the total automation done in the last 3 years. Given the base the company still has, I am sure that in the coming 6-9 months all the eligible processes will be automated using multiple technologies whether it is RPA or AI, or workflow technologies,” he added.
Also Read: How automation helped Shahi Exports survive two big pandemic waves
In addition to the processes going slow, another biggest challenge in the supply chain functions was inventory management. With orders flowing in from all the channels, it was difficult for the retailers to keep track of the inventory. Business found the solution to this problem, once again, in technology.
For example, to optimize its supply chain functions and customer orders, IKEA is doing goal-driven AI. IKEA wanted to optimize its supply chain for a smooth flow of products in the store and to customer’s homes.
“We needed to optimize the way we were managing our inventory. We are doing a lot of goal driven AI where we optimize the supply chain functions. The question was, if the customer orders online or gets it from the store, from which warehouse or store do we deliver the product from? So we have worked with AI to know the best way to do this so that the product reaches the customer in the shortest time possible with the best availability,” explained Divya Kumar, Global Digital Chief Financial Officer, IKEA
Citing an example she further explained, “I want to keep sofas in a place. I may want to keep them all at one place and deliver from there or may want to distribute them to a warehouse or different store. So the AI algorithm built underneath the model helps me decide where to keep my inventory such that it’s the optimum way and it helps me in managing the cost.”
On the supply chain side, Kumar believes there are huge quantitative benefits in AI, especially when it comes to the end-to-end operations.
(With inputs from Dhrumil Dhakan)
