The year 2024 is for scaling up GenAI pilots: IBM Consulting's Matthew Candy

livemint.com:

Edited excerpts: IBM Consulting comprises 160,000 people including 21,000 data scientists and AI professionals, and a generative AI CoE (centre of excellence) of over 1,000 people. We’re working in three big areas. One of them is customer care and customer experience—applying generative AI for contact centre agents to improve call handling times and deliver better customer experience.

The second big area is around digital labour—in the areas of HR (human resources) and talent acquisition. About 94% of the interaction that the 275,000-odd IBM employees have with the HR, takes place without human intervention. That's digital first—all through an AI chat interface, and AI that sits in more than 79 different systems, 4,700 policy documents, and supports about 2,500 processes.

The third area is around application modernization where we use generative AI in the development lifecycle—right from business analysis, design, wire framing, coding, development, testing, synthetic test, data generation, etc. Our strategy ties in with IBM's AI approach that is based on four core beliefs. One, that open technologies are very important.

Second, that AI needs to be trusted, which is why it’s important to responsibly introduce this technology into organizations and govern it. Third, AI needs to be targeted at enterprises and business domains. And fourth, we believe AI is for value creators, and not just users.

In the customer service space, we're seeing customer queries being answered with about 95% accuracy. In the marketing space, we're seeing the ability to reduce content creation costs by up to 40%. In the supply chain area, we've seen up to 50% of reduction in the cost per invoice.