Let intelligent organisations have common sense too

The year gone by has been disruptive in many ways. The pandemic has not only reiterated the importance of personal and public hygiene, healthcare research, and infrastructure, it has also led to an increase in the adoption of digital technologies. According to a recent IDC report, COVID-19 has been driving the demand for intelligence technologies to enable new ways of working.

It highlights that the pandemic has exposed the gaps and shortcomings in analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) models of organisations in India making traditional models based on the use of historical data for future decision-making obsolete.

The report indicates that businesses need to focus on a new framework for decision environments that enable real-time data capture, lower processing times, and accelerates business outcomes, to improve resiliency. It also points out that leaning on data to understand the insights into business operations, products and services, experiences, and ecosystems are among the top priorities for organisations in the country.

What the IDC report indicates is certainly the need of the hour and CIOs and CDOs across the sector – including large and small companies – are focusing on; there is a massive surge in demand for automation at all levels. However, here is the catch: while organisations are going full throttle ahead with digitisation and adding artificial intelligence to their system, they are missing the basic common sense approach.

Over the last six months, my Gmail has been inundated with emails for different Shubhendu’s in the world, and these are a variety of companies – Axis Bank, SBI Life, Union Bank, ICICI Bank, Reliance Jio, Khadim’s, Rentsher.com, and West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Limited, to name a few. While many of them ignored my emails informing them that they had sent the communication to the wrong person, those who replied said that it was the registered email given by the consumer.

A very small, early dotcom-era, a common-sense solution could have helped the companies avoid this mix-up. They could have asked the consumer to authenticate the email address. Most companies do the same using OTP for verifying the registered mobile numbers and it came as a surprise when a very senior official from one of the banks pointed out that the existing core banking solution does not have this functionality.

IDC defines the future of intelligence as an organisation’s capacity to learn, combined with its ability to synthesize the information it needs in order to learn and to apply the resulting insights at scale. I hope, the organizations also add common sense to their approach and do not ignore the small steps in their rush to big-ticket rollouts.

shubhendup@cybermedia.co.in