Digitally transformed businesses will investigate artificial intelligence, and are likely to embrace chat to streamline customer service, writes Anton Moulder

What are the digital business trends that will influence your business in 2017? Digitally transformed businesses will investigate artificial intelligence, look at Bitcoin’s blockchain, are likely to embrace chat to streamline customer service, and will put what makes sense to the customer — rather than the business — at the centre of services design.

Artificial intelligence

The year 2016 was the year when everyone explored artificial intelligence (AI), but 2017 will be the year that local companies put budget into, and start using basic AI. For those who have not fallen down the AI rabbit hole or seen Westworld, the aim of artificial intelligence is for machines to replicate human intelligence. This means they can sense their environment, and use autonomous, rational “thinking” to do something or to reach a goal.

Tech monoliths like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM are investing heavily in this emerging sector. Research firm CB Insights reports that since 2011, nearly 140 companies that have developed AI technology have been acquired as part of a race between these global corporations to own this space.

Locally, most businesses we have been working with are not sure how they’ll implement AI, but the first and biggest investments in SA will most likely be in the financial sector.

Sygnia Asset Management recently launched a RoboAdvisor, a machine-learning system that offers consumers personalised investment advice without the commissions usually charged by a human financial adviser. Sygnia’s RoboAdvisor is the digital backend of a website that enables clients to input personal information, and that uses algorithms and financial modelling to create individualised investment or retirement plans.

Magda Wierzycka says these robo-advisers are the first step of artificial intelligence in the financial sector, and that this will mature to see human-based advisory systems disappear.

If your business is in the financial sector, it is important to get up to speed with how AI will impact your business and market share, how your competitors might use this technology, and how your brand might be disrupted by technology.

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