The recent historic victory of Googles AlphaGo (AI) artificial intelligence program over the world’s human Go champion will also change the face of ERP in manufacturing. Go is an ancient and complex Chinese board game with trillions of possible moves and permutations.
This historic development where man was defeated by machine has again highlighted the potential of Artificial Intelligence and advances in machine learning.
This event reflects the depths and speed of current artificial intelligence programs and their incredible ability to learn at a geometric rate.
It is this AI capacity to learn and adapt that is set to radically change ERP solutions in manufacturing. The Internet of Things, coupled with business intelligence at an AI level, will mean market competition and real-time fluidity will create predictive and anticipatory programs that will notify manufacturing businesses of supply chain challenges ahead of time. Are you ready?
Here are four key developments where machine learning and AI will impact on ERP:
- Sentiment, emotion and empathy keywords identified from online conversations by AI will identify customer trends and satisfaction. Language understanding models like LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) can now show sentiment patterns in reporting and communicate contextually to customers in the language they use themselves.
- ERP upselling and cross selling will occur increasingly as a result of machine learning also identifying buying patterns. So for example, if a customer is buying a bicycle what else do CRM programs reveal about what other products customers are interested in buying?
- Millennials will be given confidence boosting offers where pay patterns and credit worthiness will be established by AI before an offer is made in a format that enables ease of use and heightens the convenience much loved by millennials. This will include confidence levels being raised with suppliers as well. ERP will consequently become more intuitive across the board.
- AI can monitor and surf for information and answer questions from target customers before they have even been asked. Business reporting will also transform into a social media format so that current customers will be comfortable and familiar with it. This will boost the intuitiveness and ‘’stickiness” of ERP reporting.
The Go victory of machine over man is an industry game changer. The new, “crystal ball” in ERP will be predictive analytics powered by AI. It is already transforming the ERP industry by forecasting the future. Get ready for it.
