Generative AI heralds a new era for business process operations

“We are standing at the precipice of a dystopian future where generative AI (GenAI) holds the reins, dictating our every move and shaping our reality," a prominent AI philosopher predicts. While the concerns raised by many such experts are sobering, we must focus on how this powerful technology can serve humanity by putting necessary guardrails in place.   

The world is facing a shortage of skilled workforce, resulting in a 40% decline in productivity growth since 2002. The last 10 years alone have seen a 3% drop in the working-age population. AI and GenAI can play a significant role in solving this problem. It powers:

• Extreme automation by automating the un-automatable
• Deep decision-making by enabling intellect-based insights
• Consumer-grade experience through hyper-personalized interactions

With the advent of AI, one-third of the workforce will need to be reskilled to stay relevant to the job market. While GenAI offers extreme possibilities, augmenting that with non-GenAI skills for forecasting, planning, decision intelligence and autonomous capabilities, among others, opens up avenues to innovate new services and even pioneer novel business models. 

GenAI gains momentum in business operations

As businesses witness a massive data surge, they need advanced technologies to manage, analyze and extract valuable insights effectively. This has created a symbiotic, multifaceted relationship between GenAI and the business process operations (BPO) industry, shedding light on substantial opportunities within reach when organizations reassess their processes and functions. Technologies like conversational AI, intelligent document processing, text AI, autonomous content generation, language translation and cognitive analytics have reimagined business processes, merging human creativity with GenAI's analytical capabilities to fuel innovation and transform operations. 

However, transitioning into an AI-powered organization requires discipline and a focus on upholding systems and algorithms. Organizations, therefore, should assess their opportunities through an overarching value strategy framework covering the following levers:

• Rethinking to accelerate change
• Transforming to enhance value
• Revolutionizing the ecosystem 

Rethinking to accelerate change

Traditional approaches in the digital process industry have often resulted in slow response times, higher operational costs and missed opportunities for growth and improvement. The advent of GenAI solutions and models has given the industry a productivity jolt and contributed to a significant revamp in executives' mindsets. The rethink strategy to accelerate change brings results in expected areas such as customer service, marketing content and software development, as well as unexpected areas like engineering and R&D services. GenAI can deliver 40% to 50% efficiency gains across high-propensity functions. For example, a GenAI-powered clinical advisor for a healthcare company comprising 10,000 clinicians to improve patient care sought the best outcomes for every individual. It provides recommendations for therapy practices, clinical procedures, patient management and clinical auditing. In another such engagement, a leading pharmaceutical provider implemented GenAI-powered Co-Pilot for clinical trial analytics. It would enhance the efficacy and speed of approval across various clinical trial milestones by 40%, reducing overall time to market. Increasing adoption of such GenAI use cases points to transforming the BPO landscape from Digital Process Operations to AI-driven digital process outsourcing powered by full-stack AI and GenAI solutions and models.

Transforming to enhance value

A reshaped mindset necessitates transforming existing processes and functions to support organizations in driving enhanced functional outcomes and personalized experiences. Though rethinking and implementing newer GenAI solutions to transform businesses — including process reengineering — can present considerable challenges for any organization, the benefits must be considered. 

For instance, these improvements can benefit all stakeholders — customers, employees and the organization — in a contact center ecosystem. We helped a leading European bank implement an omnichannel and agent-assist GenAI solution for its contact center. This significantly reduced the average handling time in customer service by almost half, positively impacting the service cost and achieving a 25% increase in accuracy in first-call resolution.  

In another engagement for a leading educational publisher, we delivered a hyper-personalized CX center for omnichannel online proctoring services. Contact center agents now have access to GenAI-powered assistants and conversational AI, which helps them generate 360-degree customer views, enable self-serve and quickly provide personalized answers and recommendations. The solution has reduced the average answer speed from minutes to a few seconds, enhancing customer satisfaction.

Organizations implementing a transformation strategy should bear in mind the following building blocks that can be revitalized:

• The future workforce: As GenAI becomes essential to business operations, individual roles and duties will change. For instance, software developers will focus more on generating new use cases and business models using GenAI transformers. Existing employees would be upskilled with a focus on advanced AI modules and certifications, and businesses would be integrated with end-to-end orchestration platforms to promote seamless operations. 
• Enablers in transformation: The GenAI-enabled catalysts would range from frameworks to CoE playbooks, solutions catalogs and AI labs for innovation. A point to ponder from experience is that organizational enablement can be achieved with full-stack solutions covering functions holistically, such as customer support, business operations for insights, document processing, compliance, audit and point solutions for industry verticals. 

Revolutionizing the ecosystem

GenAI plays a crucial role in enhancing productivity. It also empowers businesses to reimagine customer engagements, innovate new services and even pioneer novel business models. Enterprises actively pursue revenue expansion through GenAI, employing an ecosystem-based strategy that directly influences a customer's key performance indicators (KPIs). This entails aligning enterprise KPIs with a comprehensive impact assessment across employee and customer experiences, enhancements in self-service capabilities and accuracy and cost reductions. 

Experience indicates three pathways to create this ecosystem: 

• By building GenAI-powered IP solutions
• Through a framework-based approach
• By leveraging a solution provider

Our GenAI engine has reduced the new product development time by providing curated new product plans, BoM and supplier recommendations with historical performance and testing scenarios and product-market fit simulations before its launch, thus enhancing product success rates and minimizing the risk of failure.

For instance, a research and consulting organization has created a Gen-AI-based knowledge ecosystem and has built a platform to monetize the knowledge. In another example, a BPO organization could automate risk, compliance and quality audits using GenAI-powered solutions.

Toward a transformed future: Charting the course with GenAI

Businesses across industries are swiftly capitalizing on GenAI’s potential to achieve significant advancements. Not to mention that some sectors will benefit more than others by implementing GenAI. 

The impact of GenAI will vary based on factors like the composition and significance of various business operations and the revenue scale within an industry. Most industries can anticipate notable improvements, particularly in marketing and sales functions, with the high-tech and banking sectors poised to experience even more incredible advancements.

Ultimately, GenAI has the potential to reshape the dynamics between humans and technology, akin to the transformative effects witnessed with previous innovations like the cloud, smartphone and internet. One of the many recent research reports predicts the market for GenAI could reach $200 billion by 2032, constituting approximately 20% of the total AI expenditure, a significant increase from the current 5%. In other words, the market is expected to double every two years over the next decade. Beyond the numerical projections, the economic influence could extend even further. There is also a higher momentum among the workforce for learning and using GenAI tools, which necessitates companies to cultivate more robust talent management programs to provide fulfilling work experiences.

Putting guardrails in place 

It is prudent to consider legal and reputational risks, factually incorrect statements or any biases that GenAI tools can produce. Building fairness, interpretability, privacy and safety into these systems would be critical. To accomplish this, a human-centered design approach to simulate how actual users experience the system is essential to assess the true impact of its predictions, recommendations and decisions. 

Additionally, a comprehensive set of contextualized KPIs, including false positive and false negative rates, is essential to assess training and monitoring. Testing — unit testing, integration testing, iterative user testing and testing the statistics of the inputs to the AI system using an evolving gold standard data set — needs to be comprehensive and rigorous. 

All these come together in a responsible governance framework and trust that needs to be built using the right tools and guardrails. GenAI design principles should lay the foundation for a responsible AI framework backed by data engineering, domain-led industrialized solutions, guardrails for data strategy and a full-stack, end-to-end offering.

Finally, the loop isn’t complete without the human element. By balancing innovation with prudence, we can steer toward a future where GenAI enhances rather than undermines human endeavors.

How we lay the groundwork today shapes what comes next. To support this, we are now ready with a robust set of GenAI-powered solutions called HCLTech AI Force. This innovative GenAI platform accelerates time-to-value in business operations by transforming the underlying software development and engineering lifecycle, delivering greater productivity, improved quality and growth at scale.

With the profound impact of GenAI extending far beyond shaping daily lives, organizations must recognize the significance of riding the tide and not just adapting to the paradigm shift.