Artificial Intelligence in Practice—Less Routine, More business

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is not magic, a miracle, nor a nightmare. It is a powerful and adept mathematical machine that learns from examples, processes inputs, and generates outputs based on probability. We have already described how it works and learns in the previous article previous article. 

AI is already providing companies and organisations a wide range of services across a variety of industries. Now the time has come to see what AI is good for, where it is used, and what it can bring to Czech companies and organisations. Let’s try to briefly summarize the main points here.

Automating and Streamlining Processes

AI perfectly enables the automation of many repetitive administrative duties, processes, and tasks such as data entry, invoicing, or analysing documents or contracts. It speeds up and improves the accuracy of many boring and time-consuming routine activities.

AI has already become part of customer support, not only via relatively simplistic chatbots but also increasingly often as intelligent contextual assistants equipped with varied insight and sometimes even connected to CRM. Based on a client or partner profile it can therefore edit communications for style or content. A properly trained AI assistant can handle up to 70% of repetitive and banal inquiries and, to some extent, can even replace a live assistant.

Similarly, AI works well as a knowledge assistant in companies, helping employees familiarise themselves with internal regulations and directives or with safety guidelines.

Administration and Public Authorities

As an assistant, AI can guide civilians through legislation, regulations, announcements or taxes, can digitalise communication with administrative offices, and can simplify processes such as submitting applications or filling out forms, e.g. by providing interactive voice help.

Through automation, artificial intelligence saves time and brings significant benefits to the creation and preparation of various documents. Today, it is commonly used for pre-filling forms, transcribing audio recordings, automatically generating meeting minutes, or creating summaries, reports, and announcements.

AI also helps with multilingual communication and with document translation and localisation, including audio and video recordings.

Industry and Production

In industry and production, AI has firmly established itself. For example, AI evaluates operating data from machines, systems, or production lines, compares them with pre-loaded or learned situations, and predicts failures or defects before they occur.

Thanks to its ability to recognize images and signals, AI acts as an ideal quality assurance agent, defecting various defects, deviations, or product deficiencies based on optical, X-ray, or ultrasound images.

Not only does AI know how to code in multiple programming languages, significantly easing the workload of programmers and allowing them to focus on functional and user-oriented properties of software instead of writing code, but it can also generate comments, change sheets, program instructions, compile product descriptions, prepare safety instructions, or write technical reports.

Warehouse Management and Logisitics

AI systems may also assist in the management of automated production and warehouse management, optimise logistics processes, and monitor supply chains.

While manually planning inventory, it is not uncommon for either surpluses or shortages to arise. AI takes into account the season, weather, marketing calendar, and long-term trends to predict demand. With AI, the number of returns and waste is reduced by up to 30%, and warehouse workers can fully devote themselves to work, not to performing endless inventories.

Analytical Activities and Improved Decision-making

Within a short timeframe, AI can evaluate massive amounts of data, predict trends, and provide people price estimates to aid decision-making or help choose new courses of action. This can be helpful for interpreting corporate data or for making predictions based on market analyses and demands.

Human Resources and Personal Assistance

Artificial intelligence has found itself widely applicable in the field of human resources. It helps, for example, with CV analysis and with pre-selecting job candidates. It can monitor the needs of employers, offers from educational institutions, demographic processes, technical development and long-term trends, and forecast upcoming developments on the job market.

AI can also track employee productivity and performance and make suggestions to optimize workflows. Chatbots and AI assistants can automate responses to frequently asked employee questions, receive complaints and suggestions and possibly even respond to them.

Financial Management and Accounting

AI allows you to automate many different accounting activities. It significantly speeds up and reduces error in the routine processing of accounting documents, invoices, or statements. AI recognises invoices on its own, pairs them with payments, and updates the books. In addition, it can check these invoices themselves and point out any discrepancies, eliminating up to 70% of routine work.

Furthermore, AI is capable of analysing and evaluating investment opportunities and helping with risk management.

Cybersecurity and Data Protection

Artificial intelligence is already integrated into many anti-virus and other security systems. It can analyse behavioural patterns of computer and information systems, detect anomalies, and flag suspicious activities. It can perfectly monitor network traffic, block or eliminate threats, prevent sensitive internal information from leaking, or analyse and filter content.

Client Relations, Personalisation, and Marketing

AI can, and already does, analyse and design personalised ads and offers. Today, it is quite common to generate advertising and promotional texts (even entire articles), personalise emails and newsletters, or edit advertising messages according to client profiles.

For example, AI can work in e-shops as a digital sales assistant, recommending products, answering questions, and advising customers.

Education

Artificial intelligence is gradually finding its place in the educational sphere, as well. For example, it compiles educational courses tailored to students’ needs, monitors their progress, responds to gaps in knowledge, and guides educators through the teaching process. AI can also be used directly as an interactive tool in elementary classrooms[1].

Healthcare

In the field of healthcare, AI has already firmly established itself. It allows doctors to easily analyse patient symptoms, documents, or test results and helps them make effective diagnoses. It examines hundreds of X-rays and other scans, identifies abnormalities, and sorts them accordingly. The results are faster diagnoses, decreased burden on the doctor’s part, and importantly, fewer fatigue errors.

Based on information from prior treatments or even on a patient’s medical history, AI suggests and recommends an appropriate treatment plan. It also increasingly serves as a physician’s assistant during various surgical procedures.

Last but not least, the use of AI significantly reduces the administrative burden of managing medical staff and operating medical facilities.

Product Development and Innovation

AI already frequently helps with product development, with regard to their functionality and features as well as design elements. It significantly reduces the cost and time frame of testing and prototyping by simulating products’ operation, performance, and behaviour, providing designers with valuable information without the need to produce actual prototypes.

Recently, artificial intelligence has been significantly accelerating development, especially in the fields of chemistry and biotechnology and in the development of new chemical materials and pharmaceuticals.

Cities and Regions

AI offers municipalities, cities, or entire regions a plethora of options to improve the quality of their services and the lives of their citizens. According to a survey by the Association of Cities and Municipalities of the Czech Republic, about a fifth of towns in the Czech Republic already use AI. The benefits of AI in this sphere include saving time, lowering expenses, improving communication with citizens, and overall more efficient administration.

From air quality to traffic to infrastructural conditions, AI can monitor and evaluate a variety of information relevant to local governments, making it a powerful management assistant.

Shall We Go On?

This has been a brief, somewhat incomplete overview of the use of AI in practice, the areas in which it can operate, and the possibilities it entails. Over two hundred other inspiring examples like these from Europe alone can be found on the website of the European Artificial Intelligence Community[2].

Still, it is important to remember that AI is not capable of drafting new strategies or always making the right decision. AI only provides the most likely answers, meaning it cannot predict unexpected economic, technological, social, or political challenges. It has no experience or intuition, which must always be included in decision-making.

AI brings businesses and organisations better efficiency, savings, customer experience, and support when making decisions. The key to using it effectively is to have a strategic plan, know the goal, and choose a quality AI service provider.

AI Cloud from CRA

AI Cloud from České Radiokomunikace offers clients AI tools as a service. It provides both operating space for AI solutions well as a number of trained AI models suitable for various applications. See for yourself what it has to offer, and if you feel that AI would be beneficial for your team, do not hesitate to contact us

Learn more about AI Cloud services

[1] https://kopeckykamil.cz/index.php/blog/416-moznosti-vyuziti-generativni-umele-inteligence-ve-vyuce-ceskeho-jazyka-a-literatury-se-zamerenim-na-aktivitu-zaku-nekolik-nametu

[2] https://www.smscr.cz/media-a-sms-cr/tiskove-zpravy/umelou-inteligenci-vyuziva-necela-petina-obci-a-chvali-si-usporu-casu-ostatnim-schazi-priklady-dobre-praxe-3825cs.html

[3] https://www.ai4europe.eu/business-and-industry/case-studies