COVID-19 is having serious implications for businesses across the globe, as they adapt to the'new normal' of operating an organization remotely. Here are seven business functions at risk and the AI solutions that could help. AI can work on identity and document verification, says Dr Terence Tse, associate professor of finance at ESCP Business School. Think of a bank, for instance, that needs to verify its customers for onboarding and compliance. This is often done by human checkers, who check payslips or driving licenses.

Sales and business development are suffering and AI-powered sales performance solutions can help. So-called propensity models can identify which customers are most likely to buy a product or service from a company, says Dr Tom Davenport, president's distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, Massachusetts. These models can help those working in sales improve their productivity and effectiveness, by showing them which customers to prioritise. "For brands, having insight into what their customers think and want has always been a key priority, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made this understanding even more critical," says Chris Colley, principal of customer experience at Medallia. But he notes, at the same time, collecting data on what customers think has become more challenging.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are promising to transform the forefront of many business operations. The technology is proving itself evidently beneficial in revolutionizing the workplace culture as well. AI tends to guide, organize and automate work while improving staff efficiency and productivity. Specifically, when AI is blended with automation, it maximizes the company profits by utilizing the minimum manpower yet in a right and creative manner. The technical improvements brought in by them contribute to the management of several tasks in the office that are achieved effortlessly and employees' work becomes less tiring. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in office environments in a variety of ways over the next few years as businesses invest in digital workplace initiatives, said Gartner analysts in their 2019 analysis.

In 2018, the New York Foundling, a charity that offers child welfare, adoption, and mental health services, was stuck in cut-and-paste hell. Clinicians and admin staff were spending hours transferring text between different documents and databases to meet varied legal requirements. Arik Hill, the charity's chief information officer, blames the data entry drudgery for an annual staff turnover of 42 percent at the time. "We are not a very glamorous industry," says Hill. "We are really only just moving on from paper clinical records." Since then, the New York Foundling has automated much of this grunt work using what are known as software robots--simple programs hand-crafted to perform dull tasks.

For the third consecutive year Babson College has been named an education sponsor for AI World Conference and Expo 2019. The event will run October 23-25, 2019, at Seaport World Trade Center, Boston. This year's event will feature a significant expansion of content coverage, including new topics AI in Customer Analytics, AI and Cybersecurity, and AI for Business Leaders. Now in its fourth year, AI World Conference and Expo has become the industry's largest independent business event focused on the state of the practice of AI in the enterprise. The AI World three-day program delivers a comprehensive spectrum of content, networking, and business development opportunities, all designed to help individuals cut through the hype and navigate through the complex landscape of AI business solutions.

The research firm Gartner last year estimated that global AI business value would reach $1.2 trillion by the end of 2018, up 70% from the previous year, and will more than triple by 2022. Taking advantage of greater computing power and developments in machine learning, business leaders are tapping the power of AI to enhance customer experience, create new revenue and reduce costs. So the issue is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do it. And that's a question of whether to build or to buy. For companies that need AI to power their core business or to ensure strategic success, building is the way to go.

Chatbots are becoming crucial for customer service -- but how they interact with customers matters, and AI is one key point to creating "natural" interactions. How do you interact with your customers? Given the predominance of mobile devices and messaging apps, many experts believe the next era of customer interaction will belong to "the conversational layer" -- both text- and voice-driven -- that will use chat, messaging, or natural language interfaces to interact with people, brands, services, and bots. Join Babson College's Bala Iyer, author of the MIT SMR article "Do You Have a Conversational Interface?," as he discusses his work around customer data and user experience. Using industry examples and findings from his research, he'll offer strategies for capitalizing on conversational interfaces to capture customer loyalty.

The Netflix-produced hit was the result of an algorithm coupled with Netflix's large collection of data on what viewers like to watch. Taking that as inspiration, ad agency McCann Erickson recently added the world's first artificial intelligence (AI)-based creative director to its team in Japan. The memorably named AI-CD β will use data on award-winning commercials to produce ideas for new campaigns. The company isn't the first to let the math do the thinking: In 2014, Hong Kong–based venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures announced a new addition to its board of directors, VITAL, which uses data to vote on potential investments. More recently, Finnish tech company Tieto welcomed Alicia T., an AI complete with a conversational interface, to the board (a win for board diversity?) of its new data-driven business services unit. This doesn't mean AI-based technology will become your overlords or replacements.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. We don't typically think of the jobs that we perform as commodities. The Merriam-Webster entry on commodity describes it as "a mass-produced unspecialized product." But most of us view our jobs as specialized or somehow differentiated. We typically believe that we do them differently, and often better, than anyone else with the same job.

The Netflix-produced hit was the result of an algorithm coupled with Netflix's large collection of data on what viewers like to watch. Taking that as inspiration, ad agency McCann Erickson recently added the world's first artificial intelligence (AI)-based creative director to its team in Japan. The memorably named AI-CD β will use data on award-winning commercials to produce ideas for new campaigns. The company isn't the first to let the math do the thinking: In 2014, Hong Kong–based venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures announced a new addition to its board of directors, VITAL, which uses data to vote on potential investments. More recently, Finnish tech company Tieto welcomed Alicia T., an AI complete with a conversational interface, to the board (a win for board diversity?) of its new data-driven business services unit.