AI isn’t out to replace people in the workplace, AI’s role is to assist people – handling complex yet mundane data-crunching tasks, so your people can spend their time more productively.
Think back to before Excel, when accountants spent their days adding up columns of numbers. In theory, spreadsheets should have put them out of a job – with computers handling the task far more quickly and with fewer errors.
In practice, spreadsheets freed accountants from number-crunching drudgery. They went from human calculators to trusted advisors – delivering business value and growing the bottom line. You’d struggle to find an accountant today who’d give up Excel and go back to the old ways.
AI brings that same step change to all kinds of business problem-solving. It is great at quickly weighing up vast amounts of data, while considering a much broader range of factors than anyone could juggle in their head.
Advanced business-focused AI is divided into two main categories: Predictive and Prescriptive.
Predictive AI anticipates the future, such as upcoming demand. Prescriptive AI determines your best course of action, such as optimising staff rosters to best meet that demand.
At Daitum, we focus on Prescriptive AI. We commonly find that businesses fail to recognise the full breadth of challenges to which AI can be applied.
Businesses solve a range of problems every day. Yet they don’t always view them as problem-solving challenges, or consider ways to improve efficiency, increase revenues and reduce costs.
Take rostering, for example. You might view the business challenge as simply “draw up a functional roster”. If a person already does that in Excel, and you assume any solution will suffice, then you might not see the potential for AI.
If you instead view the business challenge as “draw up an optimal roster to most benefit the business”, then AI’s potential becomes clear. It can strike the optimal balance when allowing for everything from overtime rates and enterprise bargaining agreements to skills mix and regulatory compliance.
AI isn’t just saving time and improving business outcomes. It also offers a competitive advantage, which easily scales to help ease your business’ growing pains. You can also use AI to consider “what if?” scenarios, such as varying demand and the size of your workforce.
There’s a misconception that AI is beyond the reach of small to medium-sized businesses. They assume it’s expensive, demands vast amounts of perfect data and requires dedicated data scientists. That’s not true.
Daitum is disrupting the AI space by making this game-changing technology available to businesses of any size. AI is becoming more powerful, more affordable and less complicated to adopt. This makes it easier for every business to make smarter decisions – boosting the bottom line while freeing your people to spend their time more productively than simply crunching numbers.