Suppose there is a very smart business management solution that optimizes resources, streamlines operations, etc. This solution would have various users, admins, managers, and key responsibilities. Overall, say a minimum of 10–15 dedicated users to update various information.
Would you suggest this solution for a business with 15-20 employees? That would be insane. However smart the solution is, the business size does not justify this. Possibly some of the processes can be managed on a simple Excel sheet for such a business.
This is similar to a question: Would block chain technology help an e-commerce business selling $1 items?
What kind/size of businesses can be helped with AI involvement?
- Large data and complex decision-making is involved.
- Some decision matrices are ‘subjective’ and are taken by gut feel.
- There are manual interactions involved, which requires a lot of manpower to support, which sometimes makes the business case less viable.
- The business model is more or less stable, where complete disruptions and chaotic changes are not expected.
Here are actual examples of each of the above situations:
- Complex decision-making: A large factory making a customizable product that requires hundreds of spare parts. Decisions on inventory, complex supply chain scenarios, and waiting periods between various processes. You need to anticipate possibilities, and there is a ‘judgement’ call taken. AI definitely can help this situation.
- Any product/service support where there are questions asked by users/customers that need to be answered—a manual process can be improved, augmented, or replaced to some extent using AI’s natural language processing ability, and this is a simpler integration with a smaller training on the support information data.
- Industries like automobiles have been more or less stable for many years. Training on existing data for better decision-making will be easier. But things that are completely dynamic and fast changing—using AI on earlier data alone may not be enough, and the training will be trickier as you may need to link it with changes that can be anticipated and changes and trends that can be sniffed from the online knowledgebase/media.
At Mechsoft, it is not unusual that we say no to some tech advance that a client suggests when we think it is not useful or not right for them, even though it means saying no to a project.
-By Parag Shah, CEO @Mechsoft