How AI is Enabling Businesses Move toward a Self-Service Era

Whether you are a sales manager, analyst or CFO, you will have enquiries which will demand responses from your company.

In fast-moving enterprises, these questions come about without warning, often driven by board meetings, changes in customer behavior, regular reviews or market shifts.

Perhaps it is determining if a vendor has been paid or what the latest churn rate is or what causes it, or maybe it’s something which requires even deeper analysis – like the percentage of the company revenue which your top 10% customers represent. These are not ‘big data science’ dilemmas, but practical ones, and often business-critical ones, that still require a lot of energy to address.

What follows is an often drawn-out process involving wading through spreadsheets, dashboards and applications to source the right intelligence, and providing a response that could take hours or even days. This process is usually fragmented, complicated with data spread across different systems and tools, each owned or operated by different teams.

These delays stall progress and incur huge, unnecessary costs for a business, with some research suggesting anywhere between 20%-30% of revenue is lost each year due to inefficiencies. Beyond just delays, they also erode confidence and slow decision-making. This discourages employees from asking strategic questions.

The next stage of AI is empowering employees to access multiple data sources and generate insights without relying on layers of teams within a business for support. Rather than acting as a gatekeeper, AI becomes an enabler and removes friction.

This type of AI allows everyone to focus on priority tasks and fosters greater autonomy for all – or more bluntly; enabling a self-service approach to information gathering, answering questions and generating insights.

Evolution of AI in Enterprise

The field of “self-service AI” operates at the intersection between extrapolating key enterprise data and harvesting insights, with the facility for anyone to do it, at any time.This represents a shift away from centralized to distributed intelligence functions, where insight is embedded into workflows. As well as circumventing lengthy internal processes, teams are empowered to ask incisive questions and take on the knowledge gained. Self-service AI is more than just about “DIY business,” it is upskilling our workforces to think strategically and make deeper connections between data points.

This type of AI doesn’t just know where the data is in the company vaults, it understands its context, its meaning and can even suggest how you can use it. It can interpret relationships between metrics and flag anomalies, as well as surface trends that otherwise may go unnoticed. This is how businesses become sharper, more streamlined and offer more value to their customers.

Dueling with Dashboards and Data

The working world requires an upgrade when it comes to data literacy. Despite decades of investment in analytics platforms, workers still feel disconnected from the data which governs their performance.

97% of business leaders say data is critical to success, yet only 26% say their teams are ‘data literate.’ The result of this is wasted opportunities and wasted resources. Insights remain locked behind technical walls or specialist teams in many cases, meaning they’re underutilized.

McKinsey indicates workers spend about 1.8 hours per day,, equivalent to nearly a fifth of the work week, hunting for information.

What if this could be reduced to minutes?

New AI-engineered technology can help businesses move away from traditional, static and one dimensional dashboards, dependent on teams of data engineers and data scientists for maintenance and development.

The dashboard firms are transitioning to is dynamic – beyond having access to all the real-time data and information available, it can also interact with the user to help them interrogate the data and insights. It offers both autonomous and strategic decision making in an instant, which ultimately means better control, greater business oversight and a deeper relationship with the available data.

Self-service AI in Practise

Not all AI is equal.

Democratizing AI and data is a bold and admirable ambition, but just as many have realized from engaging with ChatGPT or other conversational AI tools, answers can fluctuate depending how you ask the questions and depending what data the platform has access to. Likewise, when private and confidential material is in play, or absolute accuracy is mission critical, undesirable outcomes like AI hallucinations can undermine trust very quickly.

To offer more autonomy and control in businesses, the AI platform would need to understand what data it can share with each person. Once these elements are incorporated, any employee can ask a question, and expect to receive an instant, accurate and personalized response, which can then be refined based on human feedback.

Employees of any level could use self-service AI to answer questions that would otherwise be referred to other departments. This both reduces bottlenecks, ensures responses are instant and allows specialist teams to focus on higher value problems or solutions.

Details about company performance or forecast, organizing rotas for different teams, which customer segments are driving the most revenue and more, could be solved, methodically, immediately.

A Head of Sales, instead of going to each regional sales manager, could tally numbers by quarter and cross-reference with their targets – they could ascertain the average time of a sales cycle expended per type of client and distribute resources accordingly, or understand whether the revenue targets are attainable based on the current pipe from marketing. This means leaders can make informed decisions in real time, instead of reactive ones after the fact.

The most profitable customers could be quickly itemized and a strategy for retention or incentivization designed as a result. As long as the information is contextualized for the AI, all of this is possible, and provided at breakneck speed.

The Opportunities AI-driven Technology Brings

Using AI in this way fast-tracks decision making, benefitting not just the bottom line but influencing the way a firm does business.

A self-service AI platform acts as the backbone of a company; propping it up, keeping it moving and ensuring all the organs which make up the business body are supported.

With faster and more effective insights, firms will become more productive. Forecasting and future-gazing will be more accurate and underpin sustainable growth. Obstacles and challenges will be prevented or managed proficiently.

As is often said, data is the new oil – and by opening the wells to everyone, there are wealth opportunities for businesses and a level of empowerment for employees companies have not yet encountered.