Work smarter, not harder with enterprise AI 

The first challenge is businesses are amassing data faster than they can process and analyse it. Researchers at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research estimate that 51% of companies are bogged down by a tangle of legacy software, platforms, and cloud-based services, with data scattered everywhere. 

The result is fragmented, labour-intensive, and frustrating experiences. Employees are often required to perform system-hopping heroics to find the right documents, validate information, or analyse data. On the other side, this data disaster frustrates consumers: 50% of Aussies rank having to repeat issues and speak to multiple agents as one of the biggest drivers of bad customer experience. 
 
With leaders under pressure to do more with less, mining all available information and extracting accurate insights in real time is essential—but mountains of unstructured data represents a major hurdle. Estimates suggest as much as 80% of an organisation’s data exists in unintelligible formats. 
 
Over the next year, AI-powered intelligent document processing (IDP) is set to have its own sci-fi moment, supercharging the discovery, sorting, and analysis of almost any file type, turning unstructured and semi-structured information into usable data. This allows employees to work smarter, get more done, and solve issues faster. 

It wasn’t long ago that every industry faced the arduous job of digitising analogue files and documents. People spent countless hours manually inputting information into digital repositories. Despite this effort, a single incorrect keystroke could render otherwise-valuable data completely unusable, or totally misleading.  
 
The arrival of optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) soon picked up the heavy lifting, turning scanned images into digital text. However, anyone who’s held a company credit card has likely wasted hours physically scanning receipts into a finance system and still having to type in details. 

Now, with tools like IDP—which acts as a cross between a virtual librarian and digital detective—teams have the ability to examine every picture or word from almost any source of information in an organisation, making a whole range of work tasks far simpler and faster.  

Consider a field worker trying to understand a fault: AI will enable them to run a search via voice command, producing a summary that blends chronological job tickets with service agent discussions. With multimedia IDP, users will no longer have to relay an accurate description of a problem—sending screenshots or taking videos will be enough for the AI to assess and identify most common faults.

The Pearson research predicts that some of the most automatable occupations are roles which involve a large amount of data-entry, like bookkeepers and account clerks. Both are set to see a decline of approximately 38% of their workforces.  

As organisations move from paper processes to enterprise AI, teams will need to be retrained and equipped with the skills necessary to put the information to good use. Pearson’s 2022 Power Skills Report predicts that by 2026 six of the top 10 skills identified as necessary to meet the demands of Australia’s economy will relate to relationship-building. 

When technology does the heavy lifting, providing more relevant and useful information, collaboration, communication, and leadership become more important to turn insight into action.  

Leaders should act now and widen the focus from building technical skills to devoting as much investment and energy as possible to human skills. At the same time, any roles that are likely to be heavily impacted should be mapped today so that affected individuals can be retrained and redeployed to areas with the greatest opportunities for growth.