Why do enterprises buy into artificial intelligence systems? Where are they investing the most? As you go to your C-suites and boards with new concepts, where should you direct your pitches? Business process automation [1]and customer support are foremost on the minds of executives and managers buying or implementing AI systems, and where many of the budget dollars.
That's the word coming out of a survey[2] of 100 executives by Leverton, which looked at corporate motivations for AI acquisitions. The leading categories of use cases seeing AI investments and work include the following:
- Business process automation 49%
- Customer support/Chatbots 47%
- Data extraction 43%
- Contract analytics 28%
- Voice/video processing/imaging 25%
Business process automation and customer support appear to be the low-hanging fruit when it comes to initial AI rollouts -- and a good place to start for nascent AI programs. "The most prevalent use cases for AI are those for which solutions have had time to mature, the problems solved are less complex and manual precedents are established," the survey report's authors observe.
Still, data extraction and analytics are emerging as AI use cases as well as of late. These use cases "are vastly more complex, especially when dealing with unstructured documents," the Leverton analysts state. "These documents may include thousands of different versions of the same question, all with variations in grammar, syntax, language and layout. The AI needs millions of records before it can begin to be effective. As a result, current solutions are in earlier stages of development, and implementation is a longer and more
arduous process."
In these early stages, AI is not seeing a huge share of technology budgets. Overall, 37 percent projected they would