AI-ready? Now it’s time to accelerate business growth

To get the best value from AI-powered tools, your organisation needs two things: true digitalisation and well-governed data. When you have both of those components in place, you’re ready for the next exciting step – using AI tools to help improve your business operations and accelerate growth. 

By Aaren Ekelund, CCO (Chief Commercial Officer) at WorkPoint.

Rethinking the way your business operates

AI has the potential to improve multiple aspects of your business, from the way you manage cases to the efficiency of your processes. For example, it can help you formulate scripts to improve customer interactions, and it can enrich decision-making with the latest and greatest data from across your organisation.

But like any digital tool, AI-powered technology works best when it’s strategically deployed. Simply switching on AI assistants, such as Copilot, won’t automatically add value to your business. AI is only as powerful as the strategy behind it and the people using it. 

The bedrock of successful AI deployment is internal data that’s continuously well-governed and structured in a compliant way. Feeding AI with high-quality data leads to high-quality results. And with that firm grounding, the way you operate case management or project management can be revolutionised by AI tools. 

Identifying opportunities to deploy AI helpers

The first step in rethinking your business operations is to analyse how things are done today and identify what could be improved tomorrow through the use of AI. By mapping how data flows through your systems, it’s possible to seize opportunities where AI could streamline your processes. Perhaps there are repeatable, manual steps in your workflows that are digital but not yet automated and optimised?

Your organisation is unique, so a one-size-fits-all approach to AI deployment – like adding an out-of-the-box tool because a competitor has it – won’t have the same level of impact as a more tailored approach where AI is deployed to meet your specific business needs. Copilot agents are a good example of customisable AI. Once created, they can connect up trusted sources of data and knowledge to help you automate specific business processes and smoothly scale capacity. 

Think of agents as your AI helpers. You can build an agent to help with any kind of business process or workflow. Trained on clean and well-organised data, agents bring a new level of efficiency to your operations. Take case management within a large public sector organisation, for example. Imagine you’re handling a case for a particular citizen. An AI helper could gather and summarise all the relevant data to support key decision-making in areas such as planning applications or eligibility for state benefits, and so on. 

Users of AI within your organisation only see the tip of the iceberg – the prompt and the AI response. It’s what goes on beneath the surface – rethinking operations with AI embedded as part of what you do – that offers the best long-term value for your business operations. On top of that, when people leave your organisation their knowledge – in the form of digital files – can stay with you, appropriately stored for surfacing and use by AI tools.  

Leveraging AI and data in a compliant way

For many organisations, one of the biggest fears (and challenges) around deploying AI tools is the security of data and the need to avoid a costly data breach. Oversharing information – whether accidentally or otherwise – is a huge concern for organisations across multiple industries. 

But when your internal data is wrapped in the security protocols of a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, and it’s well-governed with appropriate access levels, people only see what they need to and have access to nothing more. Moving forward, that’s exactly what WorkPoint 365 gives organisations that are moving into the next phase of AI implementation. In fact, we have two clear aims: 

1. Find opportunities to integrate Copilot within our own tooling to improve processes and workflows for WorkPoint customers.

2. Help partners to build AI solutions for our end-customers using the data that we’ve helped to categorise, meta-tag, and structure.

By driving efficiencies in our own products using AI tools, and by helping end customers improve their data hygiene through WorkPoint Partners, we can help organisations accelerate business growth. 

Overcoming both rush and resistance by rethinking 

AI – and its potential to accelerate your business operations – is a topic that can pull people within the same organisations in opposing directions. On one hand, business leaders can often press the need for AI-powered solutions. On the other, change can be hard for people, especially when they’re used to doing things a certain way. Fears around what AI might mean for their jobs and how it might impact their daily tasks are real.    

The best way to overcome the rush to deploy AI, and resistance to changes it brings, is to take a more strategic approach to deployment – not just implementing AI tools for the sake of it, but rethinking operations, identifying opportunities, and leveraging AI and your data in a smart and compliant way. 

That starts with a secure and structured foundation on which to build: documents and data correctly tagged and organised within a WorkPoint 365 solution, for example. From there, you can build out AI solutions for just about anything.