What stands in the way of adopting AI assistants?

What factors hinder the effective adoption of artificial intelligence in business: organizational barriers, data quality issues, and technology limits

  • What stands in the way of adopting AI assistants?
  • "AI will not fit our processes"
  • "Our current business processes will break"
  • The team will not accept the new tool

We are looking into what obstacles can slow down integration

AI in Processes 10/28/2024 Reading time: 8 min. When considering the implementation of AI assistants, company leaders weigh the risks: "our processes are hard to standardize"

, "the most important thing is data security, and how will using AI affect it?", "these tools are too hard to use." These concerns are compounded by employee resistance: if they ignore the AI tools already available, is there any point in adopting more complex and expensive technologies? However, most potential problems can be avoided. In this article, we explain how, using the rollout of a call AI assistant as an example. What prevents AI assistants from being implemented?

A Deloitte survey found that 61% of companies see artificial intelligence (AI) as an opportunity to improve the efficiency of their operations→, but only 30% have already integrated AI into their business processes. Uncertainty makes the decision harder. You can rely on the positive experience of partners and competitors, assess potential risks, consult integrators... But none of that will matter until there is a clear understanding that the new technology will benefit the company.

Let's look at several barriers that can hinder the implementation of AI assistants.

"AI will not fit our processes"

Most individual operations and algorithms are fairly similar across companies, but the business processes built on them can be unique.

Many managers fear that AI will not handle their needs or will require lengthy setup.

That is true when it comes to out-of-the-box solutions.

They really know nothing about your processes and are designed for average algorithms.

They often have their own interfaces, which are not always convenient

And they definitely always require extra steps to get results. For example, to use an out-of-the-box AI transcriber, you need to record the call, upload it to the AI interface, and then copy the transcript text from the interface or download it as a file. Think about how your call follow-up should be written. For example, it should contain only the key information, within 10 points.

You always include a link to the call recording in the follow-up email.

The email should be sent as quickly as possible, ideally within an hour after the call. At the start of the email, you include the header: project, team, call participants, project stage...

The out-of-the-box AI product does not know about that

It has standard settings: what to send in the email, in what form, and to whom. You will either have to accept this standard set or invent your own product. However, there is another option: integrating the AI assistant around your processes. But more on that a little later in the text.

"Our current business processes will break"

  1. Today you use a customer management system (CRM), a task manager for project tracking, and a corporate messenger.

  2. Some long-time clients prefer phone calls over online meetings.

  3. Some data is stored in the cloud, and some is on a server that was bought about ten years ago.

  4. All of this infrastructure is connected, and you know exactly what to look for and where.

  5. But how do you build an AI assistant into it as well and "tell" it what to take from where and where to put it? What if AI requires changing familiar patterns?

  6. What if the existing tools are incompatible with the new AI?

The team will not accept the new tool

Another barrier that slows AI adoption is employee resistance. Some may feel that using AI assistants is too difficult and requires extra time or effort. Others fear that AI will make their role in the company less important or even lead to job cuts. In the end, implementation runs into employee resistance. Some will use the tool incorrectly, while others will intentionally or accidentally forget about the AI helper.

That means the money spent on implementation will be wasted: there is no benefit, and people are demotivated.

Assess where AI can deliver impact in your process

It is unclear who will have access to confidential data

  1. In one of our previous articles→, we covered the Samsung case, where the company found fragments of its code in GPT's responses.

  2. You are dealing with equally sensitive data: customer personal information, financial data, proprietary work, and agreements under NDA.

  3. Can all of this be trusted to AI that is in the cloud and learns from all the data it works with?

  4. Will you see data from confidential phone conversations in a competitor's article in a few months? And will using the AI assistant end with a lawsuit from a client?

  5. The concerns are valid, but below we explain how to minimize the risks.

Not use it, build from scratch, or integrate it?

  1. According to McKinsey analysts, using AI in routine tasks could deliver up to a 70% boost to the global economy and to your company's work efficiency. It is already clear that companies ignoring AI's capabilities risk falling behind within a couple of years.

  2. So we will not even consider the option of not using AI in this article.

  3. The second option, building an AI assistant for your own needs, seems reasonable.

  4. That way, you can account for even the smallest nuances of your processes and are more likely to protect internal data.

  5. But if you look at the budget and effort required for in-house development, this option will look extremely unattractive.

  6. OpenAI alone required $1 billion in development funding at the first stage.

  7. Not everyone has an extra billion dollars and five spare years.

  8. The third option remains: properly integrate out-of-the-box products into your processes. An integrator should help you with that.

Proper AI Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's imagine a company that wants to eliminate the routine work of transcribing calls, saving follow-ups, and especially the difficult task of finding agreements across a million audio files.

At the start, it has an out-of-the-box AI tool that can transcribe audio calls perfectly. For example, Yandex SpeechKit or TL;DV.

But as we already said, this tool does not satisfy the client company in terms of convenience.

Every day brings dozens of calls, each one needs to be uploaded, the transcription must not be forgotten, and the short summary must be formatted correctly; in terms of security.

Calls discuss confidential data that must not become publicly accessible; based on the outcome.

To send it, the meeting summary must be formatted in a strictly regulated way, and transcripts must be stored on the corporate drive. And finding information about older calls should be easy.

The out-of-the-box AI version can only transcribe and summarize

The first thing the integrator and the client company should discuss is the call process: how and where the meeting is scheduled.

Does the company use a separate calendar for this, or perhaps a Bitrix extension?

Can the calendar automatically generate a link for an online call?

Where are meetings held, and in what format?

Are all meetings held as video calls in Meet or Telemost

Or perhaps a tool is chosen for each call that is convenient for the other party, from telephony to Meet itself?

What should happen after the meeting?

Should all participants receive the follow-up email, or should only the external user get it?

Should the email also go to anyone else, for example a department head, so they stay informed about all new agreements?

Where else, besides the follow-up, should call data be stored: in the calendar, CRM system, or ERP?

Based on this discussion, the integrator will outline which systems the AI solution needs to integrate with to ensure a seamless call process. For example, KT.Team integrated AI for call handling into its processes so that an employee only needs to press the record button during a call. The AI assistant "understands" which meeting the recording belongs to and which project the call is part of based on the participants, sends follow-up emails to all participants on its own, and stores transcripts on the corporate drive.

This AI assistant was integrated with Google Calendar, email, and the corporate drive.

To make AI send emails in the corporate formatting standard, it was given templates and prompts for creating meeting summaries. The second thing to discuss is the future of the call data.

How does the company plan to use the data later: store it in the customer or project record?

Or is placing it on the corporate drive enough?

Do employees refer to data from previous calls

And if they are contacted rarely now, why is that: there is no need, or is it too slow and complicated?

What information, beyond the call content itself, should management receive: script compliance, the ability to record agreements during the call, polite communication skills, and so on?

These three points will help you understand two things.

First: does the company need a chatbot, and how should it be integrated with the transcript repository?

Second, which additional prompts need to be developed to analyze transcripts. For example, a company may want to assess how effective sales managers are and how well they handle conversations.

For example, you can use this set of questions rated on a Likert scale (from 1 to 5 points):

A manager needs to analyze each employee's performance and how it changes over time - for that, there is a pivot table with conditional cell coloring.

An employee's or project's progress can be tracked with a very simple visualization.

To get information about past calls, you do not need to dig through dozens of transcripts - just ask the chatbot, which is integrated with the data repository.

It will find the answers itself and provide a link to the transcript file.

The third group of questions the integrator can help with is data security.

Do calls include customers' personal data: names, phone numbers, medical data, financial account details, and so on?

Are there differences in the content of follow-ups for internal and external users?

What security requirements do you have overall?

Based on these answers, the integrator will suggest where to deploy the AI and what additional security measures to take. For example, if your calls often involve confidential data such as personal information or proprietary developments, the integrator will recommend hosting the language model for call processing on your servers.

This will make it possible to isolate "your" AI from the AI that works with all the world's data. And it will protect you from leaks of confidential information.

The integrator will develop update scenarios for the language model so you can safely use the latest AI versions.

Checklist: How to prepare for AI assistant implementation?

  1. Before implementing AI, analyze several aspects: determine why and exactly how your employees will use AI. What tasks should it solve?

  2. Set key performance indicators (KPI) to evaluate the AI assistant's work. How will you measure its success? Audit the data you already have.

  3. Understanding what data you have and how it can be used to train AI is critical. Figure out how the AI assistant will be integrated into the company's current business processes.

  4. How will it interact with other systems?

  5. Schedule training for employees so they can learn about the AI assistant's capabilities and how to use it.

  6. Assign someone responsible for implementing and supporting the AI assistant.

  7. Who will monitor its work and handle any issues that arise?

  8. The main goal is to make the AI assistant a natural part of users' work, not something they see as a separate tool.

  9. To do that, it is important to strike the right balance between what the technology can do and what users need, especially in interface design.

Discuss the article: What prevents AI assistants from being implemented?

Send via: