Operational silo is a term used to define a process, management style, or business unit that does not interact with one another. These silos directly impact productivity and revenue and hamper the organization’s opportunities for growth and success. Studies show that 41% of customer experience professionals believe that operational silos are a significant barrier to providing seamless customer experiences. Understanding the need to break down these silos, businesses have turned to AI to coordinate their workflows to enable better synchronization and efficiency. With the rise in data complexity, integrating AI into business processes would play a major role in uniting siloed data, improving collaboration, and streamlining operations.

Top Business Silos that are Optimized using AI

Operational silos exist in various departments or business units in the organization, and AI could be employed in any of these business operations to break down silos. Let’s take a look at some of the primary business operations and their silos and how AI can help optimize them.

  • IT Operations: The application of AI into IT operations to solve operational silos is called AIOps. AIOps automates IT operations and enhances them using ML and data analytics. By collecting data from various IT operations devices, AIOps enables businesses to predict, detect and solve bugs in real-time. AIOps eliminates silos by correlating information across multiple data sources. It also helps with IT systems management functions and IT system log file error analysis.
  • Finance: As with IT operations, AI helps the finance team to gather data that is spread across in various formats. AI can help to significantly reduce fraudulent activities and can prevent them by detecting patterns. It can also audit 100% of all expense reports as opposed to the mere 10% that can be analyzed if done manually. Using NLP (Natural Language Processing), AI monitors communication and helps organizations view the status of financial transactions in real-time.
  • Marketing: AI is instrumental in curating marketing strategies that make customers feel that they are heard and seen. AI targets the right customers by tracking their behavior and interaction on the website and sorting them according to their interests. AI-powered personalization helps eliminate the confusion that is created by marketing silos. Since the data that is collected and analysed by the AI systems are often accurate, businesses can target their customers precisely and consequently increase their sales.
  • Manufacturing: In manufacturing, the existence of data silos results in the inability to access data which in turn prevents manufacturers from gaining the control and visibility that is required. This could be solved using AI by using data analytics at every stage of the manufacturing process. Predictive Intelligence is also used to anticipate demand and ramp up production to enable a seamless supply-demand chain. A report by MarketsandMarkets states that artificial intelligence in the manufacturing market is expected to reach USD 16.7 billion by 2026.
  • Sales: AI-based chatbots have become a common occurrence and eliminate the need for having the manpower to cater to the customer needs to make significant sales. The chatbots are available 24×7 and can answer the queries of the customer and can route the complex ones to the live agent and improve customer satisfaction. Thus it helps break down silos by improving the communication between the customers and the sales representatives.

AI can also be used to impact other business silos such as ‘Research & Development,’ ‘Human Resources,’ ‘Customer Service,’ and ‘Facilities Management.’  By improving collaboration and communication and eradicating silos, AI ensures that there is increased productivity and business efficiency. While the responsibility of getting rid of organizational silos does lie on human workers, AI makes the entire process easier by creating better-coordinated systems, both inside and outside the organization.

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