Viewing AI As An Opportunity, Not A Threat To Your Business

Martin Owen is CEO of Quark Software and is an expert in data and content management technologies for digital transformation.

The industry has been talking about AI technologies for several years, with many B2C organizations adopting deep learning technologies to better engage and improve customer engagement, streamline internal processes and gain better insights into data to make smarter business decisions that fuel business growth.

However, with AI comes uncertainty and a fear factor for many, particularly among B2B organizations. Employees are naturally thinking, “Am I at risk of AI replacing my role within the company?” and “How can I trust AI to stay within the boundaries it was specifically adopted for?” Yet some have already started to reap the benefits of embedded AI in their infrastructure to support high-performance workloads and fuel better enterprise outcomes.

For example, life sciences research institutions are taking advantage of the opportunities of AI to fast-track research for new medicines, and pharma companies are leveraging AI to speed drug development and delivery to market.

With businesses today creating an overwhelming amount of content to support digital transformation and better engage with customers and prospects, now is the time to evaluate and understand the value AI can deliver in supporting content strategies.

Here are four potential ways you can use AI as part of your enterprise content infrastructure.

Differentiate your brand.

It’s a competitive market landscape, and companies are squeezed with tighter budgets, forcing them to not only do more with less but deliver even more value to customers to remain competitive in their markets. Similar to how organizations have adopted AI to derive better insights out of their data, they now can apply AI to their content operations since content help differentiates a brand.

With massive amounts of it flowing across the organization and pushed to customers and prospects across multiple digital devices, AI technologies can help augment the skill sets of your people and give you the power to create and publish the right content that reaches your target audience faster. It gives you the power to publish omnichannel content that is timely, accurate and consumable. Importantly, you can deliver content your audience actually wants to help separate your brand from others in the market.

For example, organizations can use AI to ingest content from several different sources fast and with greater accuracy. A research worker can automate manual or low-value tasks, and knowledge workers can cut through data silos and large volumes of content to find and reuse critical information fast.

Streamline workflows and review processes.

Organizations see the impact of manual processes and have adopted collaboration systems to foster team collaboration and better manage document version control. However, managing enterprise content operations workflows is an entirely different ballgame. It’s hard to afford to deliver out-of-date, error-prone content, particularly if the goal of that content is to turn a prospect into a paying customer. If you do, you’ve just missed a revenue-generating opportunity.

Many small- and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) play a role in enterprise content creation, and AI technologies allow people to spend less time on review and approval cycles and more time collaborating and knowledge sharing to develop content that supports business objectives.

AI can be used to summarize and break down complex meeting notes or set auto review and approval cycles when supplied with content in any format.

Know the success or failure of content delivered.

You may have an idea of how much money and human resource is spent on developing content, but do you know how that content is performing? AI offers the necessary insight to see and better understand patterns related to content performance. It can help organizations know what content is of most interest to what audience, when a target audience is consuming their content and via what device. These valuable insights can help businesses take a smart, strategic approach to content creation and inform when content should be reused or retired.

When content is opened, AI may be used to surface the “moments” in content that the consumer spent time on or ignored, supporting the ability to further refine those components and make process improvements to achieve target KPIs.

Eliminate compliance risks.

Content developed and published must meet corporate guidelines and regulatory requirements, which can be a dizzying process for any organization. For example, multiple processes and approvals are associated with a pharmaceutical company’s ability to deliver an updated warning label fast to market.

AI embedded into the operations infrastructure can significantly improve team collaboration and efficiencies, supporting an organization’s ability to produce compliance-controlled content fast and across multiple output channels.

Companies can implement AI to help with data validation, ensuring the data is correct before processing it within the organization. AI can also be placed into reporting processes to ensure reports are relevant and compliant. Complex information can be broken into readable chunks for audit and legal teams and other stakeholders to easily understand.

Conclusion

AI can help organizations revolutionize their content strategies to keep pace with digital transformation. AI won’t replace a business’ most cherished asset, the people, as they bring the invaluable human factor of imagination and ideation. People know how other people think. They also know emotion plays a key role in content experiences, so this is factored in when brainstorming the style, the assets to be used and the ideal UI/UX of content to ensure it has the best chance of achieving its objectives.

People play a strategic role when it comes to operational efficiency, setting guidelines that prompt AI to augment processes at stipulated points to make them faster and more cost-effective. This helps people move away from menial, time-consuming tasks. Ultimately, AI technology can help strengthen that knowledge with structure, format and usage suggestions to ensure your content works for your business. Most importantly, your people have the necessary combined knowledge that can win over customers.