By Liza Russell – Inbotiqa, CEO

A recent MITSloan Management Review article discussed how only a limited number of companies are getting value from their investments into AI and Cognitive Technologies, despite the sector burgeoning. The authors’ view was that this was because many of the projects undertaken by companies do not target important business problems or opportunities and that some are too ambitious as the technology isn’t ready or the required organisational change too great.

As a team helping organisations to integrate machine learning and analytics into their back-office and operations workflows, we found ourselves agreeing with much of what the authors were saying. Our case studies involving the incorporation of our Intelligent Business Email platform into clients’ operations align with the thinking in the article and methods of successful integration of cognitive technologies into companies.

As such, I’d like to share some further details about our approach to taming business emails, fixing pain points and unlocking latent benefits. The results are that risk and costs are reduced; individual, team and company productivity are substantially improved; customer service levels are boosted; higher SLAs achieved; and unprecedented management insight into operational risk obtained.

Email is the primary tool for business communication, both internally and externally, and email is the problem we set out to solve from day one. Email fundamentally contains a wealth of vital information: instructions, email-based processing, inter-business communication, and so on. This information is also often critical and/or time-sensitive but trapped and handled chaotically in employee mailboxes and personal-folder filing systems.

By converging workflow with email a seamless integration is created, thereby avoiding multiple point solutions that often find teams reverting to email during task execution at some point anyway. The tamed business emails become actionable and trackable tasks, pain points are fixed, and analytics unlock valuable latent information held within them. Proprietary machine learning technology sits on top of existing email systems, combining normal email with intelligent email, and removing the need to build complex and intimidating AI systems.

YUDOmail manages current email addresses, incorporating real-life audit-trail history and a wealth of big data, including all email text attributes and threads. YUDOsmart adds AI and incremental robotic process automation, using smart analytics to automate one process at a time and hand it over to an RPA system. YUDOanalytics enables bite-sized business-process changes to deliver unprecedented business intelligence and the ability to gain from it.

Any organisational change associated with integrating Inbotiqa is designed to be incremental with a marginal-gains approach. Pilots are run, managers and staff are trained and supported from the outset, and the process of adoption is swift aseveryone already uses email, and can continue to use email, but Inbotiqa-enhanced email. The journey has led to Inbotiqa technology passing the highest level of information security and penetration testing at top Tier1 banks and world-leading Business Process Outsourcing services firms. But, like our algorithms, we’re always looking to learn more and improve both product and experience.