At OpenText Summit Africa 2023 key players from the tech world both in South African and abroad got together to discuss what Business 2030 will look like, especially with the rise of the new batch of artificial intelligence (AI) models.
In a breakout session after the main keynotes, this idea was taken even further. The breakout session, in the data values stream, looked at Operations Management in the Age of Automation and AI. More than that, what are the outcomes of AI?
Kevin Leslie, ITOM Director at OpenText International, suggested in his presentation that there will be a distinct collection of outcomes for AI that will be the key to addressing obstacles to transformation. These obstacles include inflationary costs with shrinking budgets, sustainability requirements, technical debt, cloud complexity, a shortage of skilled staff, and service instability.
Optimising costs and carbon footprints is the first of the ideal outcomes of AI. The recurring sentiment from OpenText Summit Africa 2023 was that AI needs to be carefully balanced against sustainability. Thankfully these two ideals are not at odds with each other but are instead cyclically helpful. AI can not only track environmental impact but also suggest ways to reduce it. AI can also be used to streamline and optimise all aspects of an organisation, further decreasing carbon outputs.
“I was talking to some of my colleagues before I came to South Africa and they were asking ‘why should South Africa care about sustainability when we’re more worried about pressing issues such as loadshedding?’. Sustainability reporting is required to a certain extent here in South Africa but any organisation that is exporting to the EU or the US has to comply with reporting requirements for sustainability there. What we have been doing is helping our customers measure and manage this for reporting,” Leslie said.
Improving the process of moving to the cloud is another area where Leslie sees AI having an ideal outcome. The costs and complexity of this are quite apparent to OpenText, a leader around the world in not only cloud ecosystems, but also on-premises and hybrid solutions. An AI system to govern and automate this process is what customers have been asking for, and OpenText is here to deliver.
Improved reliability and increased IT agility are two more outcomes for AI. Customers demand 24/7 uptime and the agility for systems to be ready for big changes whenever the organisation is, and these are two difficult tasks. AI will be right on hand to assist with both, with its supreme vigilance and unmatched speed to match customer expectations.
Finally there is the outcome of talent. AI isn’t a tool to replace the talent of employees, but to enhance it. With improved training, onboarding, and further education of employees all possible with AI, the future workforce is empowered by AI, not replaced by it.
With these key outcomes of AI in mind this may not be the endgame of what artificial intelligence has to offer the business world, but it is what we can expect today and tomorrow. OpenText is already tackling these outcomes today and they can help you do the same.
