Leveraging AI for success
Professionals from all walks of life are feeling the change, and the pace of user-centric AI-based tools like ChatGPT or Co-pilot has been stupendous.
Every few years, humans make technological innovations that put them on a completely new trajectory of development. The last such innovation was the Internet, and the next is Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it transforms how we live, work and do business.
Professionals from all walks of life are feeling the change, and the pace of user-centric AI-based tools like ChatGPT or Co-pilot has been stupendous. The second episode of Mint's all-new series on AI, All about AI, presented in association with Salesforce, saw a cross-section of experts deliberate how technologies like AI and ML are disrupting India’s work landscape and what the future holds for us.
Talking about how AI is transforming the way we do business, Sajin Mangalathu, CFO and CIO of Hero Fincorp, a tech-led financial services firm, said: “We have been able to leverage much more data than what we used to in the past to understand our customer better. How we use that data is very important; that is where AI and ML come in. We have the tools now, but I would say the building block is that we have much more reliable, accurate data which describes the customer.”
Even though AI and ML technologies are still in their nascent stages, businesses have started to leverage their power to serve their customers better. Each of us generates data on an everyday basis—when we use digital tools, browse through information, use online banking or UPI, or file GST data as merchants or SMEs. Financial services firms like Hero Fincorp can use all of this data to map the entire customer journey.
AI enables better underwriting.
Hero Fincorp disburses small loans to people who may not have an established credit profile. AI tools are helping the organisation better understand to whom they are granting the loan. “There is much more KYC data available. Data in Aadhaar, or credit bureaus, for instance, is a non-intrusive way of seeking information from the customer. You can provide your consent and we can read your KYC data,” he said.
The next step is to judge whether the customer has the repayment capability and the correct loan size. AI has changed this process. Earlier, Hero Fincorp would ask for bank statements for this assessment. With AI, banks have access to data and are using AI-based tools to conduct the analysis.
“Now, with technologies like account aggregator, you can give us consent to read the banking data to the extent that is required for us to be able to underwrite your requirement. Earlier, there was a subjective process of underwriting you where somebody would look at your data and then decide whether it fits the risk policy and decide the amount of loan accordingly. Data and AI have removed the subjectivity and made the entire process objective. Revolutions in computing now allow us to manage much more data, and you are able to then decide what’s the right product for the customer,” he further said.
This has lowered the risk of banks, which have a much more accurate reading of the risk that every customer represents. Therefore, the ability to predict the risk and the likelihood of losses has improved.
Ethics and customer data
The kind of data available has also changed. Earlier, banks culled data from mobile devices, etc. Now, several government agencies put out formal data in the form of digitised land records, the amount of milk a farmer produces, etc. This is a lot more reliable. But as we get more connected, is the risk of our personal data being leaked out higher?
“More transparency has come in when it comes to the kind of data which is being collected from customers. We can access customer data only after getting consent. Data transfer is mostly by a policy framework put out by the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the financial services industry. The policy now states that you have access to the data, but we only manage the data till you allow us. Once the purpose of that data is over, we have to delete and destroy it,” Mangalathu said.
The evolution of AI
When it comes to AI, there is a new development every single day. Salesforce has been at the forefront of transformation for the last 25 years as they change the way their customers interact with their customers through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. The company has been innovating with the latest technology trends, and the latest one that everyone wants to adopt is AI.
“At Salesforce, we’ve been working on AI for the last 10 years on the predictive side. At work, we make about 2.5 trillion AI predictions a week for our customers on our platform. Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen the whole focus shift from predictive to generative AI. The scale at which this is operating and the promise that it holds, it clearly is going to disrupt and transform every industry, every function, everything that we do. It is easily one of the most disruptive technology trends that I have seen. And I think every customer is keen to figure out how they can jump on that bandwagon. So we are innovating fast and furious to help our customers in that journey,” said Arun Kumar Parameswaran, SVP and MD – Sales, Salesforce India.
AI for Business Vs Consumer AI
The world of AI for business is very different from the world of AI for consumers with tools like ChatGPT. Parameswaran felt that while consumer AI is great when you start putting AI into business, three problems need to be addressed. “You’ve got to solve a trust layer problem in the organisation. Second, the underlying data model is going to be the key to how accurate your AI predictions can be. The third part is how we want to drive efficiency and productivity for your organisation,” he said.
Every organisation has more than 70 per cent of the data sitting in silos. If you want to bring AI to work, organisations' first task is bringing all the data together. Salesforce offers a five-step solution for this – AI Enterprise to harmonise all the data, Customer 360 to have a single view of the customer, a good collaboration tool, driving your system to bring intelligent analytics and insights, and the last one is the trust layer. These are the five steps to the AI enterprise which we are working with all our customers on,” he said.
AI for the future
Salesforce created solutions where a whole range of underwriting processes which were very manual are going to get completely automated. AI is going to fundamentally revolutionise how we do business. “It is all coming down to two things – how well do you know a customer, which comes down to how well your data is organised, how personalised are you going to be in terms of offering the right product for that customer at that point in time, and how do you wow him,” Parameswaran said.
One of the key considerations is to ensure data integrity, privacy and security. In a shared data environment, especially while AI is being leveraged, every organisation needs to deploy the right solutions that ensure trust. “At Salesforce, AI starts with our trust layer, and that trust layer is all about looking at your data and making sure that the data is where it needs to be. We don’t own customers' data or store it. We're very clear about our data use and policy,” he further added.
AI in logistics and supply chain
Talking about AI in the supply chain industry, Kapil Mahajan, Global CITO, All Cargo Logistics, said: “It’s not just transformative. It's hyper-transformative. Over the next decade, I believe that it's going to augment every business process going forward and bring a lot of cognition into the enterprise. For every business process, without a user actually knowing, there will be an AI workhorse in the background that will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting. A lot of the repetitive tasks that would get automated within the core systems of the enterprises.”
Logistics is a labour-force-heavy industry, and there is a looming fear that AI will take away jobs. Mahajan felt that such fears had come each time a new technology took over. “There have been leaps in technologies, starting with the desktop computer. When it came out, people thought jobs will go away and you won’t have accountants anymore. But, we still have more accountants than we had decades back. I think it will be the same with AI. The prediction is that we would have additional 15-20 million jobs getting created in the future,” he said
Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio.