AI Adoption by Businesses Amid COVID-19

With the coronavirus continuing to evolve with the advent of new variants and related restrictions and lockdowns across the globe, it has become utterly crucial for companies to examine and reconfigure their businesses. 

The catastrophic effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic have compelled organizations to adopt analytics and AI to secure business continuity while balancing the priority of protecting health. Due to the persistent uncertainties, companies have begun acknowledging the potential of advanced digital and cognitive tools and technologies for addressing the predicament. 

In the present scenario, AI is recognized as an effective tool for companies to repair (tackle the current challenges), rethink (make necessary modification), and reconfigure (pushing fundamental transformations in the functional process to hold a competitive edge). 

AI is an effective tool for companies to repair (tackle the current challenges), rethink (make necessary modification), and reconfigure (pushing fundamental transformations in the functional process to hold a competitive edge)

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With the increased digitalization which has further heightened by the covid-19 pandemic, the need for AI-enabled applications has grown drastically. Since AI has the potential to enable companies to expand their IT and IT-enabled products and services to cater to untapped markets, It not only facilitates new opportunities for companies but also helps them to restructure their existing functional model.

AI adoption statistics

One may wonder how wide is the AI adoption in the enterprises. Well, in around 86% of organizations, AI has evolved into a “mainstream technology”.

The study conducted by PwC finds has reported that 52% of businesses have accelerated their AI adoption programs to counter the challenges that have arisen due to the pandemic. 

It has been observed that AI is particularly used in two fronts more prominently –

1. Front office transformation: As customer services were adversely affected by the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, 80% of the companies have been investing in automation tools for many front office activities like personalization, sales staff productivity, and user experience.
2. Automation: Almost half of the overall businesses are reported to be using algorithms for automating regular decision-making and management. 

In another study by Appen, 67% of companies are forecasted to further accelerate their AI adoption in the coming year. Such growing adoption of AI is expected to result in an annual 26% increase in local economies. AI is also predicted to create a value addition of USD 15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. However, in order to make these estimates real, businesses are ought to start considering AI as an essential part of business and not just a luxury. 

Future of AI adoption by industry

When the markets around the world will eventually recover from the Covid crisis, the businesses that adopted AI tools will have more opportunities for building value and launching new ventures as they can be in a better place to re-configure and re-align business models as per changing customer needs.

The forthcoming boom in business growth after pandemic and looming innovation will be a data-driven one, thus modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and analytics are bound to play a pivotal role in fostering business growth in the future.

AI needs to be woven into the fabric of the enterprise. In doing so, businesses need to recognize that in developing countries like India, improving demand may be a potentially more relevant benefit than savings through automation. Hence, given the availability of a large pool of skilled resources, AI efforts need to be directed towards assisting humans to prepare businesses for the future.

AI efforts need to be directed towards assisting humans to prepare businesses for the future.

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