Chapter 3: The AI Ripple Effect: Transforming the BFSI

AI is changing how companies compete, operate and grow. In today’s business climate, change is constant and increasing. Companies no longer propose to reinvent themselves through a few adaptive strategies once every couple of years. Still, they are looking to manage multiple business transformations and often overlapping transformations. AI is already established in all types of business, realizing the science-fiction reality of 10 years ago, in all kinds of business, including healthcare, finance and manufacturing, retail, logistics and education. AI has already demonstrated, long before the pandemic, its value as a solution to drive systemic change, either by automating back-end processes and number-crunching, but now applying in a way that is assisting more strategic decision-making, optimizing customer engagement, facilitating inquiry, generating product innovation and changing business models altogether. In health care, AI-based diagnostic software is enabling clinicians to better and earlier diagnose life-threatening illnesses when there is a greater chance for a cure. In the world of finance, algorithms build economic models and execute trillions of dollars in high-speed trading or personalized wealth management. Retail giants like Amazon rely primarily on AI to forecast the demand for a product, dynamically manage inventories asynchronously and provide personal recommendations for product purchases that drive customer activity, engagement and sales. In manufacturing, AI-based predictive maintenance reduces downtime and extends the life of expensive equipment. In farming, meanwhile, AI-driven drones and intelligent sensors optimize irrigation and crop monitoring, allowing farmers to grow more with less.