Just like gold hunters did back in 1851 during Australia’s continental gold rush, today’s organisations are becoming AI opportunities and prospectors. This analogy might seem eccentric at first glance; however, just as the gold rush had a profound impact on society and the economy in its time, the exploration of AI today is similarly shaping our world in significant ways.
Setting the Scene
The vast and varied world of AI is a lot like navigating the expansive Australian Outback. In the middle of it –AI field-, a gold hunter –you– are chasing its next Golden Nugget -improved performance of the business. You already found Opals previously as your organisation might have implemented efficiency methodologies (see article A2P) and deployed key prerequisites (see article AI Readiness). But after you’ve discovered extracts of gold -by using ChatGPT for example- you know that you want to dig deeper into this topic. How do you know where to explore first or in other words, how can you determine which AI opportunities are the most valuable to prioritise?
Know your Use Cases: identify your Outback tracks.
Use cases are the starting point of every Discovery project, they are specific tracks and limited zones within the total Outback (+6 million km2). In AI, these use cases act like pathways, guiding organisations through the intricate world of technology.
In business terms, these successions of repetitive and low-value-added tasks are organisation-specific processes, and they ensure a quality level of service. AI use cases are opportunities within the organisation’s processes where technology can support human intervention in order to make it more performant in terms of time, consistency and also quality.
The most promising tracks can be identified by qualifying their volume and value, their associated pain points and their impacts on performance and people. Following this use cases methodology enables the identification of the LLMs requirements such as content generation, classification… This is key information to assess the technical complexity of the use case in the next step.
Capitalising on our cross-sectorial experience, onepoint already mapped an AI use cases list per industry to help you think beyond the obvious. Below are some examples we observed:
- In the Higher Education sector, AI use cases can provide 24/7 assistance to enhance students’ life experiences and improve support services or retain and guide applicants based on questions and interests to support the enrolment and admission process.
- The insurance sector can benefit from AI by streamlining complex actuarial calculations, aiding the design of profitable insurance products, or by generating personalised communication which will improve customer experience and loyalty.
- In the sector of Manufacturing, AI use cases can be to perform market material benchmarks based on specific criteria or support the quality control part of the QAQC process.
- In the Retail sector, AI use cases can implement the now well-adopted chatbot for returns and feedback, or optimal staffing levels for store operations.
- The utilities sector can benefit from AI by implementing predictive maintenance patterns, or Resource allocation based on demand to optimise the distribution phase.
Discover AI opportunities: chose your Golden Nuggets
Once you know “where” you have the most chances to find Golden Nuggets, the next step is to evaluate the Golden Nuggets themselves: how big are they? How reachable are they?
To do so, using our AI Use Cases Discovery tool enables the organisation to carry out an exhaustive investigation across its different functions, and targeting areas that could benefit from Generative AI and AI use. Based on pre-identified business processes, this tool assists the “gold hunter” in identifying, qualifying, and quantifying the value of opportunities offered by the implementation of AI in the targeted process. By sifting through all these opportunities with the tool, the “gold hunter” prioritises the drilling of their gold mines. They define their roadmap for exploiting opportunities by the value and complexity they have measured. They focus on quick wins and plan their projects for long-term heavy lifting in alignment with the organisation’s strategy.
The AI Use Cases Discovery tool is a filter of 35 criteria in total to qualify every Use Case through 2 axes:
- The first axis focuses on the value brought by a people’s tryptic: customer – employee – external resources, and the value based on the performance composed of the organisation activity and the financial gain and savings. Some examples of the topics of the questions asked are the overall volume, the impact on User Experience, and the innovative value.
- The second axis deals with the technical feasibility and requires having a realistic description of the AS-IS and TO-BE state so that the technical gaps, accelerators and eventually blockers can be high-level measured. In this axis, the questions are about the legacy system, technology challenges, business maturity, data readiness, security, and Privacy.
Get inspired by examples: how big can be Golden Nuggets?
Learn = Fun (*) is a National actor in Higher Education that is preparing its scholarship strategy for the upcoming promotion. During an ideation workshop, a teacher pointed out that the rise of MOOC platforms (Massive Open Online Courses), YouTube channels, and books is a direct risk to their current way of teaching. The Methodology and Innovation Responsible agrees and seeks new ways to provide qualitative services.
- AI can be implemented to identify patterns in student performance to customise teaching methods.
Pade-Bobo (*) is a Worldwide Insurer company which recently merged with a local actor. During the harmonisation of Claims Management processes, the Management level finds out that the Claims team is overwhelmed with the number of tasks required to create and qualify a claim. Their first thoughts are to reduce these steps, however, most of them are legal obligations and can’t be removed.
- AI can be used to help the Pade-Bobo Claims team by classifying documents, detecting patterns in claims data, and enhancing the claims process.
Manu (*) is a Regional manufacturing organisation with multiple production sites. The annual internal audit reveals a lack of performance whereas the Board expected the opposite after the heavy investment in adding machines. Among others, the audit points out that the site manager is overwhelmed by a lot of unstructured and sometimes expired data to make decisions.
- AI can help Manu by generating augmented production data visualisations in real time.
Goods4Good (*) is an International Retail company that is evolving in a high-competition market. Recently the company observed a decrease in the average shopping basket from e-clients. The marketing and sales teams suspect that it is due to the large choice of products that can create indecision while shopping. They want to improve UX but also want to explore beyond this idea to provide a unique Client experience.
- AI can be implemented on Goods4Good e-commerce solutions to enable online shopping behaviour patterns and product recommendations based on e-shopper browsing.
Power+ (*) is a National Utilities organisation that is growing fast: the sales team is bringing new clients, new partners, and new projects every week. Exciting news for Power+! Unless… that is on the back side, the associated administration tasks start to take over the core business activities.
- AI can help Power+ by producing monthly billing and reminders.
By implementing these AI use cases, all these organisations support their operational teams by removing repetitive and low-value tasks. Of course, human verification remains necessary but considerably timeless. Employees have now more time to focus on high-value activities!
In conclusion, AI is a new, vast, and constantly evolving field. Having such a wide range of efficiency opportunities within organisations can lead to poor choice if a Discovery analysis is not realised in the preparation phase. Just like the gold prospectors in the Australian Outback, it’s crucial to carefully select opportunities for an effective investment strategy.
So, are you ready to chase your organisation’s Golden Nuggets?
(*) All names are made up