Leveraging AI to steer business processes to optimal outcomes

Business applications exist to accelerate and improve business processes, and the next generation of these applications will be powered by AI.

Legacy applications were workflow-driven and sought to automate a defined business process. AI-powered applications go beyond workflow to automate the automatable, and to arm humans with as much context and insight as possible to address the remainder.

Amit Bendov, the founder and CEO of Gong, calls these “autonomous applications,” borrowing the notion of a hierarchy of autonomy (levels 1-5) from the autonomous vehicles industry. We don’t believe that AI will replace humans—we believe humans working with AI will replace humans who don’t.

Some of these apps will become truly autonomous with no humans in the loop (“Level 5”), and the business process runs on its own. Performance is measured simply in outcome delivery. More typically, the application will be semi-autonomous, helping steer the business process and enabling human operators to more consistently and efficiently achieve superior outcomes.

Autonomous applications can be used differently, and allow modern enterprises to compete in creative ways. Exciting autonomous application companies can already be seen in horizontal enterprise functions like sales (Gong, SetSail), marketing (Copy.ai), engineering (Jellyfish), recruiting (Findem), employee service (Espressive) and even content moderation (Spectrum Labs). Other enterprise functions such as customer success, finance, HR and product management will be fertile ground for new autonomous applications as well.

Vertically-focused, AI-powered applications are also important as the data tornado touches down in specific industries. Life science promises as profound a transformation as any. Advances in data collection, such as low-cost sequencing, have radically scaled data availability. Mathematical and computational approaches open the door for new research tools, medical equipment, diagnostics, and perhaps even therapeutics fundamentally enabled by data and AI. Pharma and biotech are in dire need of computer and data science chops, and companies like Seer (proteomics data platform) and Asimov (AI-powered synthetic biology) aim to help.

The impact of AI on user experience is surprisingly under-appreciated. Great consumer-grade design is part of the equation, yielding a measure of delight that drives adoption and usage—a familiar story.

What’s new is how this usage generates proprietary data through the operation of the application itself. Smart business applications will combine this “synthetic data” with domain-specific machine intelligence to raise the bar even further. Radically streamlined, context-driven experiences are now possible, free of the drag and distraction of workflow pathways irrelevant to the user’s in-the-moment goals.

Autonomous applications can offer a whole new level of dynamic, optimized and, yes, delightful experiences geared to the specific needs of customers, employees, and business partners. Obsession with experience will be pervasive in the world of AI-first businesses, and will help transform the nature of work itself.