Getting Facts for Critical Decisions and Answers Faster

A constant barrage of questions plagues businesses of all sizes, and every second matters when it comes to turning around answers and informed decisions. The ability to get holistic views and answers to more difficult decisions is becoming a key differentiator for businesses.

However, it's not just about getting access to more data or having greater visibility over your organization's data assets. If you're like business leaders today, you know that information resides in multiple places and that digital solutions are constantly changing. The right enterprise search strategy and the tool can help you make better decisions faster by providing the information you need when you need it.

The Infodemic Dilemma

Whether you're a business trying to collect information about your customers or an individual wanting to compile information about your favorite topics, having more data can be better. However, gathering data does not always lead to understanding. The business problem of having an overwhelming amount of data is what some refer to as an infodemic.

The problem is that the amount of information you have to work with is growing exponentially and threatens to overwhelm even the most organized mind. What if you collected so much data that it became difficult for your business to make sense of it?

Your company has a lot of data—and a lot of tools for tracking it. But how do you actually use it? These are the technological factors that contribute to an infodemic. The challenge of how to manage your data overload and drive better outcomes will only grow larger, and business strategies must adjust.

Embracing the Digital Transformation Journey

Staying ahead of competitors nowadays often requires a journey of embracing digital transformation. When companies can understand the meaning of their data, it can powerfully transform whole business processes. For example, finding the right search query results can be complicated, but it is one of the many positive results of a digital overhaul. 

There are many stumbling blocks and challenges along the journey toward transitioning to and initially implementing an enterprise search product, for example, but they can be dealt with. Critical signs that your organization might need a search solution include finding relevant information only in bits and pieces across multiple outdated documents and a lack of one central location to find answers.  

There are concrete steps an organization can take to prepare for digital transitions. When researching potential solutions and desired features, it is helpful to know what your end users think and where they think improvements are needed. Determining your use case and success criteria will go a long way toward ensuring the success of an initiative. Then not only will your employees get fast access to information, but your customers will, also.

The Need for Speed and Resilient Answers

How quickly are your customers given answers? If it's not instantaneously, you're failing. If your customer service reps struggle to quickly find accurate answers, you run the risk of lost revenue opportunities. Customer service reps know that faster responses impact sales and customer retention. 

Getting fast answers and facts to business questions can be a game-changer. When information changes, so does everything else, and informed decisions have a huge business impact. Professional knowledge workers have to conduct research before arriving at conclusions, but this process can be overwhelming when the volume of information is high. A research process should provide an overview of available knowledge and help find areas that require additional investigation. Recent advances in machine learning and AI have made it possible for companies to get a holistic view of their customers, know the experts, and make informed decisions.

AI-Driven Decision Support

AI has taken center stage in the search engine industry, and enterprises have more options available to insert AI decision-making features into their workflow and business strategy. By using AI to identify the user intent and understand a user's query, more relevant information will be provided to individual users and organizations. This further reduces the time it takes to make decisions, provide more accurate results, and overfulfill the expectations of the users.

What kinds of decisions can AI help with? It depends on the type of AI. For example, deep learning neural networks are often used to predict things like customer churn or even online activity. Other forms of machine-learning algorithms make recommendations for things like products or media content. Companies are also looking to artificial intelligence to help automate decisions, such as which products or customers should receive extra attention. AI helps with many business decisions such as fraud detection, customer service, and employee management in increasingly sophisticated ways.

A new set of problems with accountability in AI have appeared that we've never had to deal with before. How do we hold a machine accountable for fair and equitable behavior or errors? Mistakes happen when AI models are trained using data that is incomplete, biased, or unrepresentative. This has led researchers to adopt XAI, or explainable AI, methods that explicitly force AI systems to divulge their decision mechanisms.

Soon, it will be commonplace for business decision-makers, knowledge workers, and customer support reps to have instant access to data throughout large enterprise organizations and the analytical power of an AI support system to sort through millions of documents, contracts, collateral, and intelligence to fuel decisions. As the inner workings of AI processing become easier to grasp throughout the enterprise, we will see more and more benefits of digital transformation.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/02/04/getting-facts-for-critical-decisions-and-answers-faster/?sh=6808b7ef2791