Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Consulting

Many avoidable outcomes could be prevented if someone was watching. Adverse events may be a rare, but when they occur, the human and financial impacts can be devastating.

AI can be your watcher. It has the power to continuously monitor data to find anomalies. Applications include watching for fraudulent activity, defects and quality issues, and safety risks.

Even better, AI has the power to learn which complex data patterns suggest an impending problem. This capability often makes AI a better watcher than any human.

Creating an exceptional customer experience is foundational for every business. A customer’s experience is shaped by your responsiveness, personalization, watching out for the customer’s best interests and ease of interaction.

To complicate matters, there is always a trade-off between customer service and operating costs. These decisions are usually made with the best information available.

AI can optimize your customer experience and operating profit at the same time. This could be as simple as making predictions about customer attrition so that you can take corrective action.

Core operations often hold on to manual processes the longest due to specializations and years of expertise. It can seem that there’s no practical way to augment or replace manual processes due to their apparent complexity.

However, labor costs from these manual processes may be too high, preventing scaling of the business. With higher throughput often comes higher rates of errors or quality concerns.

Combining AI with Robotic Process Automation and other tools allows many time-consuming activities to be replaced. Not only can AI learn from aggregate years’ experience of your existing team, but it often can also make better decisions, faster.

Companies compete on customer experience, but also pricing and foreseeing market conditions. Those who can most rapidly adapt pricing, production and logistics will have an advantage.

Changing your response with spreadsheets and “instinct” leads to unreliable outcomes. The time required to accumulate the necessary information usually means that response times are too slow to make a difference in the marketplace.

AI allows you to make informed changes based on massive data crunching and confidence intervals. AI can perform the ultimate what-if analysis by plugging in potential business responses and seeing how it is most likely to play out.

Process improvement and re-engineering is traditionally performed by process analysts.  They observe, take notes and plug data into spreadsheets to review performance.

AI can deeply consider every piece of data to help you optimize business processes.  Instead of basic charts in Excel, AI can look across multiple dimensions at once for a clear understanding of factors correlate to the best outcomes.

What if you could predict which customers were likely to go to your competitors?  How would you respond to prevent it?  AI can give you this sort of hidden insight, presenting new ways to unlock value.

AI can be tricky to get off the ground even in mature organizations. Many companies start by hiring high-priced data scientists who immediately begin sifting through data.

Yet, the concrete business value never seems to materialize. Eventually a wave of skepticism overwhelms the imagined sandcastle of possibilities. We understand the disappointment this creates.

It is important to recognize that AI is a powerful tool in the toolbelt, but does not itself make you more competitive, responsive, intelligent. AI must be paired with a deep understanding of business process change, system integration and operationalization.

Our AI Business Case & Roadmap will identify opportunities for AI that have high potential for ROI.  We work with you to define and articulate a roadmap to start your journey the right way, and our business cases can help you understand how AI transforms your specific scenarios to create financial and operational lift.

Our business cases are informed by our Industry Vertical experts and market research, ensuring you will be armed with a financial analysis to make a strong claim for funding and buy-in. We help you plan a roadmap that introduces AI into your organization.  Topics include funding and anticipated returns, pilot programs, introducing change, establishing an internal competency, and technical approach.

We understand the importance of having your first AI project be successful. AI continues to be recognized for its ability to drive major financial lift, but you might still have a few skeptics. Through a Centric Rapid Pilot, you will approach AI conservatively, strengthening your case to expand.

We start by workshopping with select executives by identifying opportunities for meaningful process improvements, sourcing data, and clarifying how AI would fit operationally into a future state.  Once we have settled on an AI use case, we conduct a brief analysis of available data to determine if the necessary signals exist.  If not, you can pivot to a different use case with relatively small investment.  If it makes sense to proceed, Centric will build an initial model to prove efficacy.  Phase 2 of most pilots will be operationalization accompanied by light process engineering and change management.

AI may lead a business process by alerting you to adverse business conditions or proposing optimizations.  Other times, AI augments an existing business processes, helping it to become more efficient or effective.

Our business consulting group and technology teams will bring all the right ingredients.  We lead you in a discovery process to identify use cases.  During a technical implementation, our teams bring expertise in machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM) and analytics. Just as important is the people side of process change.  We will document and streamline processes, communicate the upcoming changes, and apply a robust change management strategy.  With Centric, your people will embrace the change as a positive improvement.