In science fiction movies, it often happens that robots or computers make decisions or advise the human on the best next action to take for a given situation. The technology is now made so, that reality surpasses fiction! For this last post about the Synergy project, I have decided to give you some concrete examples of what orchestration and smart decision-making can do for your organization.

As we have seen in previous posts, the first steps in using artificial intelligence are to make information and processes digital so that they can be used. However, have you ever asked yourself the following question: why doing that? What is the ultimate business value of artificial intelligence? The answer is quite simple: being able to determine the next best good action.

What does that mean in everyday life? I will give you two real cases to illustrate this value.

When nature gets involved

Imagine a manufacturing company with several plants across North America. The company has an integrated digital supply chain that gives it full, real-time visibility on the supply chain. One day, one of the plants had to close for a few days because of a hurricane approaching the coast (a situation that is becoming more and more frequent with climate change).

The digital tools in place allow us to predict the orders that will be impacted by this shutdown. A human must then look at the whole situation and determine how everything must be redistributed to minimize the impacts. However, what would you say if artificial intelligence was able to recommend an optimal action plan? What would you say if the computer knew your customers well enough to determine which order should be “sacrificed” to reduce the impact of the shutdown on your business results?

If you think I’m dreaming in colour, you just read about Watson Supply Chain Insight.

When an employee steels data

Now let’s imagine a large company in which an employee decides to steal data in order to sell it on the black market. You will tell me that it sounds like déjà vu… and you are right!

Within this organization, several digital tools are in place to detect fraud and abnormal behaviour. On the other hand, abnormal situations are simply reported on a dashboard and a human must then determine what to do with the alert. What would you say if an automated process was triggered to orchestrate the investigation and follow up on each of the actions taken to correct the problem? What would you say if this device learned from your past decisions to create customized and dynamic incident response recipes?

Again, if you think I’m dreaming in colour, I suggest you read more about IBM Resilient.

Are you interested in the topic?

You’re interested in the topic of orchestration and artificial intelligence, but you don’t know where to start. I invite you to contact me or follow us to learn more about our Synergy project!