Every business has a use case for artificial intelligence (AI) to support automated decisions, and some researchers believe that 100% of businesses will realize that potential and pursue the combined technology by 2025.

In 2019, 54% of companies surveyed by Forrester Research were implementing AI, but the IT research firm expects that number to rise quickly. Outside of the big tech firms, most companies integrating AI-powered automation have pursued between six and 200 use cases, said Mike Gualtieri, principal analyst at Forrester, at the UiPath AI Summit this week.

“We believe in all businesses, there are hundreds — if not thousands — of use cases for automated decisions that can benefit from the use of AI,” Gualtieri said. “There’s still an enormous amount of running room. ”

“Digital decisions” are what Forrester calls the ability to use business logic — informed by analytics and coupled with automation — to create routine, repeatable operational decisions or customer decisions. Gualtieri said good use cases for a digital decision are those that involve real-time decisions, operational decisions and large data sets.

“There are use cases for AI to automate decision making in all of your business,” Gualtieri said. “If you think about your business, whatever industry you’re in, those decisions exist.”

Cross-industry examples of such decisioning include:

• Determining carrier assignments in order to meet a delivery promise;
• Examining transactions to decide if fraud is present;
• Deciding on actions to prevent customer churn;
• Deciding when to service a machine before a costly breakdown occurs;
• Deciding whether to approve a loan; and
• Determining the best customer discounts to apply to maintain loyalty.

During another, unrelated event, Keith Kirkpatrick, a principal analyst with IT research firm Omdia, offered a deep dive on using AI to automate personalization in financial services. The use case goes beyond chatbots to offering personalized recommendations for services, based on customer historical data and other external data sets. For instance, if a customer is saving a lot of money, they may be looking to make a large purchase, like a car or a house. If interest rates are favorable, then the AI might trigger an automated promotion based on low interest rates, Kirkpatrick said at last week’s AI Business Week Symposium.

“Ultimately,” Kirkpatrick said, “the goal here is to be able to take this data, recognize patterns, create scenarios off that data, and then actually provide on the fly adjustments so that you, as a bank, can respond to a person and their needs and wants on a more individualized basis, as opposed to just throwing out offers or offering them products or services based on static factors.”

Kirkpatrick offered a list of AI finance personalization use cases, including:

• Risk assessment and compliance;
• Fraud detection and mitigation;
• Personal financial advisors;
• Claims processing;
• Credit scoring and loan analysis;
• Human emotion analysis; and
• Algorithmic trading strategy performance improvement.

Kirkpatrick stressed that it is vital for AI-driven actions to run seamlessly, with “minimal consumer intervention required.” He added that “Each decision must be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that all the outcomes meet the customer expectations. ”

The challenge is an AI use case may be hindered because the process is codified in Java or COBOL applications, Gualtieri said. To intelligently automate decisions, banks must extract the process from the code and make it external to those applications, he said.

“Most enterprises have decision logic that is hard coded in applications,” Gualtieri said. “Just think of all the decision logic that you have — it’s very expensive, it’s very difficult to change. The lion’s share of those decisions … do not have analytics, they are not informed by AI. Therein lies this tremendous opportunity for automation and automating these decisions.”

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.