Business transformation: Break through barriers with gen AI

Incorporating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into business operations is a key component in maintaining a competitive edge. GenAI is redefining operational standards across industries, from streamlining call center interactions to tailoring customer experiences. Yet, mastering the full potential of GenAI is a daunting task for many companies. In this blog, I look at some of the opportunities GenAI presents to business operations, explain what’s holding companies back, and then introduce a tool from OutSystems that can ease the adoption of GenAI.

GenAI in business: The opportunities

The digital era we live in demands that businesses judiciously exploit technology for competitive advantage. Among the various technologies available, such as low-code and the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) stands out. It has the potential to radically transform multiple facets of business operations, spanning customer service to data analysis.

GenAI, a subset of AI, is making significant strides in transforming business operations across various sectors. Here are a few examples.

GenAI in contact centers

After integrating GenAI, call centers operate more smoothly, respond more quickly, and deliver a more personalized experience to every customer. Generative AI can handle routine inquiries, provide instant responses, and assist agents with real-time suggestions, significantly reducing wait times and enhancing efficiency. Additionally, GenAI gathers valuable insights from customer interactions, helping businesses better understand customer needs and pain points.

GenAI in ecommerce

In the world of ecommerce, GenAI is instrumental in tailoring product descriptions to appeal to an international audience. It can also power chatbots that can answer customer queries, resolve issues, and provide personalized shopping experiences. These virtual assistants can analyze customer behavior and preferences in real time, offering tailored product recommendations and help with purchase decisions. GenAI can also enhance inventory management and demand forecasting by analyzing sales data and predicting trends.

GenAI in the workplace

Generative AI is revolutionizing the workplace. It excels in knowledge discovery, quickly sifting through vast amounts of data to provide employees with relevant information and insights. Virtual assistants powered by GenAI can automate mundane tasks, such as scheduling meetings, managing emails, and generating reports. Additionally, GenAI enables the creation of personalized development plans tailored to individual career growth and skill sets, helping employees advance their careers more effectively. By integrating GenAI, workplaces can enhance productivity, improve employee satisfaction, and foster a more innovative and efficient work environment.

GenAI in fintech

The potential rewards of GenAI integration in fintech are substantial. For example, Klarna has an AI agent powered by generative artificial intelligence that is currently operating 24/7 in 23 different markets and communicating in 35 languages. This AI Agent is expected to boost Klarna’s profit by $40 million this year. This underscores the incredible efficiency and global reach that GenAI can offer, transforming customer financing services into a smooth multilingual operation that significantly bolsters the bottom line.

These are just a few examples of the benefits of using GenAI to transform business, but the path to that transformation isn’t always easy. Implementation complexities, inflated costs, security risks, and the absence of domain-specific context in extensive language models present significant challenges.

Generative AI integration: The obstacles

Despite its many advantages, the path to GenAI integration is fraught with obstacles. Implementing AI can be complex and costly, requiring significant resources and specialized artificial intelligence expertise. The fast-growing array of AI tools can lead to management and integration issues, a situation referred to as AI sprawl.

Additionally, ensuring safe and secure AI implementation adds another layer of complexity, necessitating stringent security protocols and advanced measures to safeguard sensitive information and data. And the absence of domain-specific context in large language models can limit the effectiveness of AI applications. Consequently, businesses often struggle to harness GenAI in ways that align with their specific needs and goals, making thoughtful planning and robust support systems essential for successful integration.

Moreover, as AI systems become more sophisticated and autonomous, the potential for unintended consequences and biased outcomes increases. Companies must grapple with issues such as algorithmic fairness, transparency, and accountability to ensure that their AI implementations do not perpetuate or amplify existing societal biases. This requires not only technical solutions but also a deep understanding of the social and ethical dimensions of AI.

A tool designed to address the practical implementation of GenAI as well as ethical and security concerns can help your business overcome these GenAI obstacles. Fortunately, OutSystems offers one.

Enhancing business with OutSystems Agent Workbench

To fully tap into AI's power, businesses require the appropriate tools and strategies. This is precisely where OutSystems Agent Workbench steps into the picture. Agent Workbench is a groundbreaking capability that is part of the OutSystems low-code platform. Designed to help businesses benefit from the immense potential of agentic AI, it enables the development of AI agents that streamline operations, elevate experiences, and grow revenue.Let’s dive into the details.

Demystifying the complexity of AI

Agent Workbench simplifies the process of agent creation and orchestration, making it secure, scalable, and transformative. It demystifies artificial intelligence complexity, lowers the cost of implementation, and offers a scalable, standardized platform to hasten the development of Agentic AI use cases. It centralizes agent development and orchestration in a single platform so you can reduce redundancy, increase oversight, and eliminate the risk of AI agent sprawl.

Connecting to the models and data sources you need for your AI agents.

With Agent Workbench’s AI data and model integration features, you can configure a foundational layer of large language models (LLMs) and data to fuel agent action and decision-making. Unified access to third-party and custom AI models as well as enterprise knowledge sources help you scale AI agents and future-proof your AI strategy. Because data and AI models are integrated at a foundational level, the agent understands the data it pulls, applies policy logic, and takes informed action autonomously.

Driving business outcomes

The benefit of Agent Workbench to your business is that it enables you to use agents to drive outcomes, such as improving efficiency and productivity in customer support or HR. The user-friendly interface of Agent Workbench allows anyone to build agents with the models and data sources curated by the IT team.

Transform your business with Agent Workbench

Adopting agentic AI is the inevitable way forward for businesses striving to stay ahead of their competitors.

OutSystems Agent Workbench can help drive your success. It streamlines the process of creating AI agents that use their own models and data. By combining and governing agent creation and orchestration, Agent Workbench ensures more scalable, controlled, and accelerated agentic AI implementations. Agent Workbench is an indispensable asset for any business. It provides a fast and easy path to becoming an agentic enterprise.

To learn more about transforming your business with AI and OutSystems, attend our virtual event. Make AI your app development advantage: Learn why and how.