Webinar On Demand: AI Changemakers Roundtable

Artificial intelligence is seeping into all facets of business, from using AI data to anticipate customer needs and facilitate personalized customer experiences to using AI to transform critical processes and eliminate repetitive, labor-intensive tasks to boost productivity. There's no doubt that AI has been instrumental in improving efficiency and automating manual processes, but there's still so much untapped potential.

Are you fully taking advantage of AI in your tech stack? To explore this question and more, we invited Dr. Rashmi Misra, GM, AI Platforms, Business Development for Microsoft and Scott Owen, VP of Global Business Development and Channels at our strategic partner, airSlate, to join our CEO and co-founder, Ray Meiring, in a roundtable discussion. This latest webinar offered insight into the future of AI and how technology companies can use this ground-breaking science to their advantage.

“Fundamentally, AI is the capability of a machine to be able to perceive, learn, and essentially reason in order to extend the abilities of people and organizations; it’s a set of tools and approaches to empower and augment our own abilities in the jobs and tasks that we do.”

 

- Dr. Rashmi Misra 

Here are a few of the highlights from the roundtable discussion.

What defines ‘good’ AI?

Dr. Misra noted that good AI amplifies human ingenuity, helping employees to do more, achieve more, and learn more, while enabling organizations to take advantage of these benefits within their day-to-day operations to drive meaningful innovation. Ideally, AI should be connected to an organization’s strategic goals and business goals, empowering employees across the breadth of the organization.

Good AI is, by definition, responsible AI, that ensures reliability, safety, privacy, and security are engineered into the system. Grounded in accountability and transparency, good AI treats users equally and inclusively.

What does the future of AI look like for tech companies?

Microsoft’s AI investment roadmap is the signpost that many industry partners follow, ultimately influencing the AI path of companies and their tech stacks around the globe. According to Dr. Misra, the guiding force around AI development at Microsoft is to make sure systems continue to amplify human ingenuity to help employees. “Thirty years ago, we used to say that every company was a software company; today, every company is becoming an AI company, using AI systems to enhance what they’re doing.”

With the speed and acceleration that is happening in the industry, AI technology is rapidly transforming business processes; companies are beginning to use AI data in meaningful ways to engage their customers, empower their employees, increase operational efficiency, and reduce costs. Going forward, more companies will use AI to increase their agility and inform the type of product and services they offer.

We’re seeing a lot of progress in single-purpose AI, such as recognizing images better using OCR, understanding documents better, and generating speech in multiple languages. Dr. Misra remarked that we’re beginning to see places where AI is not only used to recognize images, but also to caption, tag, and apply meaningful attachments and meta context at a level that surpasses, or is on par with, human ability. This development adds nuances to things like content search, content moderation, and permissions management, in addition to being able to discover insights across all types of data.

“Companies are now stringing these individual AI capabilities into processes, going beyond ‘how do I understand a particular document’ to looking at industry-specific processes and pulling them all together into end-to-end solutions to create intelligent workflows. Furthermore, prediction capabilities are helping decrease the variability of processes,” noted Misra.

Let’s talk AI, the sales process, and the B2B tech stack.

AI eliminates time-consuming tasks, such as data entry, that monopolize the time of the sales team, time that would be better spent on revenue-generating activities and relationship building. Sales leaders can take advantage of AI to accelerate the sales cycle and improve the customer experience; in conjunction with the CRM, AI automates various sales and marketing processes, such as content distribution, RFP response and proposal creation, and select customer-facing processes, e.g., bots interacting with visitors on the website.

AI is helping B2B companies build on the data they currently have or are collecting, while enabling all of the users – developers, business users, analysts – to use no-code, point-and-click type of experiences to build custom AI views, i.e., to see which customers are prone to churn, or automatically route customer requests to specific teams.

For sales professionals swimming in content and data but not sure how to use it effectively, AI can recommend the right content at the right point in the sales cycle, and even recommend how to personalize that content. “Machine learning recognizes which content was successful under specific circumstances so that optimal content – the best case study, the most relevant webinar, the most persuasive testimonial – can be recommended at a future stage to deliver the best probability of winning the deal,” noted Meiring.

In addition to automating labor-intensive administrative tasks, we’re seeing AI help sales teams extract certain phrases from documents for sentiment analysis, helping elicit vital insights from unstructured data. Sales teams are also using AI to drive lead scoring, propensity-to-buy modeling, and churn predictability.

How do tech partners airSlate and QorusDocs each use AI today?

airSlate is a global SaaS technology company providing no-code workflow automation, electronic signature, and document management solutions. The company’s mission is to empower individuals and teams to digitize business processes on their own. To this end, airSlate is using AI systems to eliminate mundane tasks and augment human touches.

“The reason we call it ‘no-code’ workflow is that we deploy AI bots. airSlate is essentially a data transport platform and, in the process of automating workflows, we transport data between applications and between systems of record,” said Owen. “Through AI, there’s access to a lot of data that can be used to drive business decisions.”

Automation, coupled with AI, is what airSlate refers to as ‘hyperautomation,’ a trend that is quickly picking up speed. The AI system driving this hyperautomation uses natural language programming (NLP) which lets bots interpret human speech, optical character recognition (OCR) which lets bots convert images to readable text, and machine learning which lets bots identify patterns in the data.

In addition to partnering with airSlate to leverage its e-signature solution, QorusDocs uses AI NLP across our platform to automate and accelerate the proposal process. For example, AI transforms how sales teams respond to a security questionnaire:

“These documents contain potentially hundreds of questions, commonly presented in spreadsheet format, and are incredibly time-consuming to complete manually. This is where AI kicks in for us,” noted Meiring. “QorusDocs uses NLP to ‘read’ the questions, find the best answer, and insert the answer into the questionnaire.”

“Plus, machine learning helps refine the process as the user accepts or edits the answers per their unique requirements. Over time, the platform gets better and better and can answer the questions more rapidly with far fewer human interactions. A questionnaire that would’ve taken a day or two to complete manually can now be answered in minutes.”

To learn more on these points and other great insights into the powerful potential of AI for B2B organizations, listen to the full discussion: