EY Italy: artificial intelligence at the centre of business investment
EY Italy's research into artificial intelligence provides a starting point for sharing our experience of applying it in the company and how it has helped improve our customer service operators' daily work.
The first edition of the 'AI Barometer' study by EY Italy shows that artificial intelligence will be an investment priority in the coming year for one company in three. The study involved more than 4,700 managers in nine European countries, including 528 Italian professionals from various sectors, to analyse expectations, challenges and future uses of AI in business.
The study shows that 76% of Italian respondents already have direct experience of artificial intelligence. Most use it mainly in their private lives (43%), while 12% use it at work and 20% in both contexts. This growing enthusiasm reflects a change from the past, when scepticism and distrust of the new technology prevailed.
Investing in artificial intelligence today gives companies the opportunity to position themselves as leaders in an evolving, increasingly competitive market. One company in three has planned significant AI investment for the coming year.
Italy stands out in Europe for workplace AI adoption: 24% of respondents say AI already affects their business, compared with a European average of 19%. A further 46% of Italian respondents expect AI's influence to grow over the next three years. Despite these positive expectations, almost a quarter believe AI could replace some activities on a large scale, and more than three quarters of that group expect staff numbers to fall as automation increases.
Staff reductions are certainly a controversial issue, and it is difficult to know the actual medium- and long-term impact.
Without claiming to have all the answers, we want to share our company's experience of AI adoption. We approached this new technology because we needed to modernise the processes at the heart of our business: customer service. Curious about the major players, we experimented with applications to simplify human work where it was fragmented or error-prone, eliminate repetitive and sometimes demotivating tasks, and reduce the stress of meeting extremely tight deadlines better suited to machines than people. We experienced AI's great potential for our processes and successfully offered excellent services in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and cost savings.
In our business, AI performs activities also carried out by operators, and workloads can be difficult to predict and fluctuate sharply during the day, week, months and seasons. We have been able to retain the same workforce while meeting urgent needs with less stress and achieving results that would have been impossible relying on people alone.
There is still a great deal to do. We continue to experiment and research so that customer care services perform ever better and meet as many requests as possible, delivering an outstanding user experience. Operators will also be recognised as skilled professionals capable of resolving more complex cases where human input helps find a solution and reassure the user. Perhaps one day artificial intelligence will be able to do that too, but that will mean we have many people able to study, configure and train AI models, because AI cannot learn from itself, only from us.
