I recently had the experience of upgrading my Samsung phone to the S9+. Now for all the iPhone fans out there, this is not your cue to stop reading, this story has relevance to you too.
Upgrading a phone is always a contradictory emotional experience, on the one hand, you are excited to experience all the new features and capabilities, but on the other, you’re also a bit nervous as the transition may not be as seamless as it is supposed to be. Nonetheless, we soldier ahead.
This particular upgrade was seamless, within an hour my new phone was up and running. Everything I had on my old phone had been transferred and my nervousness subsided.
Then the power of artificial intelligence (AI) started to kick in. The first thing that happened was my phone started to tell me my daily activity status – suddenly I was paying more attention to my sleep routine, walking steps and eating patterns. Bixby (Samsung’s virtual assistant) started suggesting all sorts of interesting information relevant to me, I would leave a store and suddenly I would get asked about my experience, or if I went to a restaurant, Google would ask me to rate and share information, such as whether or not the place was wheelchair friendly, sending me a request to be a local tour guide. The next thing I knew I was involved in a world of sharing and collaboration, and being more observant of the environment around me.
User-friendly AI
What I found interesting about this experience was not the ‘oh wow this is new’ factor – in fact, my old phone already had a lot of these features and capabilities – but the difference now was that information was being surfaced to me in a friendly, more relevant to me, way. It wasn’t hard work, I didn’t have to remember to constantly check my activity status and remind myself to do things. My phone was doing all the work for me and the gentle reminders were all it took to encourage a change in my behavior and thinking, making me a better me.
This got me thinking about the reasons we at SYSPRO are so excited about artificial intelligence and SYSPRO Harmony, our social ERP platform. With Harmony, we have embraced the experience of social media behavior alongside AI, enabling users to engage with data in an easy, unobtrusive way.
The outcome of this is we are surfacing information through the platform more seamlessly to encourage business application users to look at things differently, observe business trends easily and subtly remind them to look at what’s happening within the organization.
So as we integrate further into a connected digital world, don’t forget it’s not only our personal lives which can be transformed for the better. Powerful systems like SYSPRO ERP can also make our work easier and our businesses perform better, simply by changing the way we interact with important information.
