2018: the year of AI

Source: Lenovo. Bhatia.

2018 has been the year artificial intelligence (AI) shone.

Sumir Bhatia, President, Asia Pacific, Data Center Group, Lenovo says AI “has become the centre of conversation when it comes to accelerating innovation and driving digital transformation for businesses”.

Rob Newell, VP, Solutions Engineering, Asia-Pacific, Salesforce, even goes so far to say that that “enterprise-ready AI isn’t tomorrow’s innovation, it was yesterday’s”. This is because the company has been embedding AI into customer relationship management (CRM) to empower a company’s sales, service, marketing and IT professionals to make every customer interaction faster, smarter and more predictive. Newell shared that Salesforce Einstein, for example, already powers more than 1 billion AI predictions for enterprises per day.

Source: Salesforce. Newell.

“In Asia, however, adoption has been relatively slower – while most people are aware of the technology, three in five admitted to not understanding what AI really is,” he said.

Benefits galore

Sage believes that AI will play a bigger role in helping businesses become more efficient in 2019. “At the time of writing, Sage’s real-time productivity tracker estimates that lost productivity due to administrative work has cost businesses in Singapore over S$8 million, or around S$27,000 per day in 2018.

Source: Sage. Wherrett.

"Automation through AI can help traditional professions, such as accountants, dedicate more time to driving greater business value instead of being bogged down by menial tasks,” Arlene Wherrett, VP and MD, Sage Asia said.

“Embracing emerging technologies, such as AI, will also be key for smaller businesses that may face great challenges in managing cashflow and hiring skilled resources. AI can be a useful technology that can ease some of these demands by taking on some of the mundane or repetitive tasks, freeing up human workers to redirect their attention to higher-value, profit-driving or more strategic activities.”

AI talent crunch

Bhatia said that there is an inability to define a business case for AI, as well as competing investment priorities, as businesses have many transformation objectives, but limited budgets. “Finally, the lack of talent in AI and technology as a whole is not news to anyone, but could potentially be the single greatest barrier to AI growth,” he said.

“At Lenovo, we have committed US$1.2 billion in R&D investment to help bring AI to life for our customers, which includes Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) and four AI Innovation Centers around the world, where with our partner ecosystem, we work with customers to develop their first use case. These efforts have improved our demand forecasting accuracy, and we offer these solutions to other manufacturing companies such as Baosteel, improving the Chinese steel manufacturer’s demand forecast accuracy by 30 percentage points to nearly 90%,” he said.

Source: Tableau.
Ong.

Personalisation is next

Newell said recent Salesforce research has reinforced the need for AI to deliver more personalised customer experiences across every touchpoint, with 84% of consumers in Singapore and 73% in Hong Kong saying it is very important for companies to treat them as a person, not a number.

The hidden corners of AI

There are still questions to be answered, of course. Leslie Ong, Southeast Asia Country Manager, Tableau Software, said there is some skepticism about whether AI recommendations are trustworthy.

“This has led to the rise of explainable AI - the concept of understanding and presenting transparent views into machine learning models. Currently, many of these applications don’t show the algorithms or logic behind decisions and recommendations, so organisations piloting AI programs are rightfully concerned about the technology. Business leaders are therefore increasingly demanding their data science teams to use models that are explainable and offer an audit trail around how models are constructed,” he said.

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