Artificial Intelligence Brings Out the Real-Time Side of B2B

The constellation of cognitive technologies – artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing – continues to become larger parts of business operations. A new survey of 1,000 companies released by Infosys finds 86 percent consider themselves to be well along in their AI deployments and are realizing tangle business benefits.

The rise of cognitive technologies means one thing: business is developing the capability to analyze and react to events in real time, employing a variety of approaches – from simple automation of processes to transformation in executive strategy-making.

See also: Artificial intelligence needs big data…and big data needs AI, too

This transformation to highly responsive, real-time enterprises is documented in a recent eBook published by IBM.

Cognitive technologies will play a key role in reducing the friction seen in B2B networks, especially in the following ways:

Access detailed, real-time transactional intelligence: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing provide a way to “understand, correlate and collate digital transaction data that you exchange with third-party partners provides the opportunity to deliver new levels of visibility and insight into transactional intelligence.”

These solutions enable decision-makers to “search and view the entire lifecycle of a transaction in real time and in context – and drill down to the granular detail of a specific transaction,” the report states, adding that the new generation of cognitive solutions will play a role in managing data correlation “across dozens of data points for each transaction to enable deep visibility into business transactions. This can be done across the entire order-to-cash or procure-to-pay cycle down to the underlying order, shipment and receipt details.”

Monitor and analyze partner performance in real time: These technologies “provide the ability to leverage cognitive technology to quickly and continuously monitor and analyze partner performance in real time.” The solutions enable enterprises “to create smart alerts to monitor transactions and partner performance against SLAs, KPIs, and benchmarks, also in real time.” This real-time visibility into supplier and partner performance makes it “significantly easier to conduct partner profiling and benchmarking and drive innovation such as milestone prediction. This allows you to finally see which suppliers are holding you back and which are growing your business.”

Empower supply chain and other line-of-business users: “The transactional intelligence and cognitive correlation of data and documents make accessing information significantly easier and faster,” the report states. This boosts self-service access to information for both internal decision makers as well as B2B executives, who are aided by natural language search and expert guidance. In the process, IT doesn’t get bogged down with queries or requests for reports from users.