Being aware of AI and its capabilities is integral for a support team working with a business. It means utilising AI is a skill IT companies need to have….
And there are not many industries that would not benefit from its use in some way or another in 2024…
Thousands of businesses of all sizes will use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage interactions with customers and potential customers or an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to support automation and processes in finance, HR, procurement, and more.
These systems help organisations build customer relationships and run businesses - with the aim of improving services and increasing sales, productivity, and profitability.
And these systems can greatly benefit from AI.
How do we use AI?
With the EPX helpdesk ticketing system, we use an AI to speed up the time it takes to solve an issue for our customers. Our AI can search the system - all of the tickets recorded - to see how we solved a similar problem in the past.
Should that problem/ticket be picked up by a human who has dealt with the same issue in the past, they will be able to solve it just as quickly - but if it is a different engineer, or was a problem that occurred many years before, it is the AI that speeds up the process.
The future of AI
Application programming interface (API) is the software that allows two applications to talk to each other and share data within organisations. If you want someone filling in a Google form to be automatically added to a Mailchimp database APIs can make those different systems talk to each other.
The next step is RPA - Robotic Process Automation
You can interact with a system without it having an API, you configure the RPA programme to say double click on this piece of software on the desktop, and when the window loads type this in, and when it says password type this. You can then say press file, press export, click this save button. Then you can say open this document and export at the end of the day.
A lot of tasks are now being dealt with robotically - it is not a robot arm sitting on a table somewhere - it is just software.
Products like Zapier and IFTTT have made APIs accessible to the masses because APIs need programming and complicated code whereas Zapier and IFTTT don't.
How does it work in practice?
EPX CEO Dan Ellis says: “A company recently said to me that they have five or six wagons that they have to fill with pallets and drop them off around the country and they have two people whose full-time job is ascertaining and calculating delivery routes.
“I used my phone and came up with 10 random towns and I asked Chat GPT ‘Can you tell me the best route to connect all of these places please?’ and it did…..two routes, two vehicles, in the quickest way possible. When I pressed it further it told me there was software I could buy that could automate it for me.
“Another example was a firm that had 12 people doing insurance assessments, filled in by hand. Now, an automated script interprets the paper form, figures out what the humans are saying, assesses the claims against criteria, and then makes decisions en-mass - 12 people became two.”
Does AI mean the loss of jobs?
As with the examples above - it can result in job losses, but it can retain jobs and increase productivity and growth.
EPX is using AI to allow the existing team to get more done - as a result, we need more people not less.
Why is utilising AI a skill companies need?
Being aware of AI and its capabilities - especially within CRM and ERP systems - is integral for a support team working with a business.
It allows us to look over existing systems, analyse business processes, and advise where technology can be used to improve them - including the use of AI where relevant.
Want to plan your IT strategy with AI on the table?
Hundreds of companies across the globe are opening themselves up to the possibilities of AI and those that don’t consider it could see themselves falling behind their competitors.
Get in touch with us to make sure IT is part of your business planning...JTNDZGl2JTIwaWQlM0QlMjJzbGlkZUJ1dHRvbiUyMiUyMGNsYXNzJTNEJTIyc2lkZS1idXR0b24lMjIlM0VHZXQlMjBJbiUyMFRvdWNoJTNDJTJGZGl2JTNF
