Back in January, the general excitement of the new year felt palpable. Business was booming, and unemployment had reached a 50-year low. It was unfathomable that, just a few months later, we’d be living a life within the confines of our homes.
The Internet, though, seemed poised for this pivot. Digital transformation was already on an uptick before the pandemic. Now, with a captive at-home audience, digital services can prove their value and staying power, and move forward with a new urgency. According to one recent report, digital adoption jumped five years forward in just eight weeks.
One powerful engine behind these digital transformation efforts? Artificial intelligence (AI). As industries—from healthcare to financial services to retail—use this moment to rethink how they operate, AI will be a cornerstone of digital operations to come. In fact, our digital future depends on it. Businesses that use AI to adopt, adapt and design their products will be able to connect with customers and end users in a more personal and experiential way.
“The best products are always built upon deep insights into real human needs and behaviors,” says Diego Rodriguez, Executive Vice President, Chief Product and Design Officer at Intuit, the global financial platform behind TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. “So it is essential to start by spending time with customers to understand their lives. Then you can build on those insights by bringing the best technology to solve their problems in new and innovative ways.”
Essential transformation for essential industries
The healthcare industry has been apprehensive to move its services into the digital realm largely due to privacy issues and physician reluctance. But, whether hospitals are overwhelmed with patients or closed as a precaution, the pandemic has left them with no alternative.
To fill the sudden void in non-COVID-19 patient care, telehealth services are now booming, with predictions that virtual visits will top one billion this year. One provider even reported a hundredfold increase in telehealth visits in the last month alone. While driven by necessity, now that patients have experienced the convenience of medical care from the comfort of their homes, it’s expected that these services will become more mainstream. Armed with data as a helpful diagnostic tool, AI is playing a role in helping doctors identify ailments based on machine learning.
But that’s just the start: telehealth’s meteoric rise will likely pave the way for a host of other digital transformations in healthcare. And AI will be on the frontlines. The technology has tremendous potential to transform the industry—beginning with time-consuming administrative tasks that bog doctors and nurses down, and extending to remote monitoring and health screening applications.
“Over and above helping automate tedious administrative tasks, artificial intelligence will play a key role in providing physicians and medical researchers with insights about patient health, disease progression, and even help discover new drug therapies,” says Intuit’s Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer Ashok Srivastava. “Some of the early applications of AI were in the healthcare space and I believe that many powerful AI applications will be helping people all over the world.”
Delivering financial confidence amid uncertainty
Beyond healthcare, the financial industry is seeing a sudden boost in digitization, as well. Amid record unemployment and unprecedented stimulus packages, many people’s financial situations have changed drastically. In a precarious time for many, it’s more critical than ever for professional service organizations to lead with a customer-centric approach that is specifically targeted at their primary problems and anxieties.
“Empathy is the wellspring of innovation. It helps you ask the right questions so you can frame what you're building in the right way,” says Rodriguez of creating products with the customer’s needs in mind. “The truth is we can build anything we can imagine, so being hyper-focused on the right customer problem in order to build the right experience for them—that's the key.”
Rodriguez and the broader Intuit team have long held this approach. The combination of the company’s complex AI offerings—a blend of natural language processing, machine learning and deep learning—and its human financial experts is designed to set customers at ease, without the hassle and inconvenience of paperwork and in-person meetings. All of which is under a microscope, making the design of the technology with the customer in mind even more crucial.
“When you build products using artificial intelligence, if you design in a customer-centric way, you're not employing technology for the sake of technology alone,” says Rodriguez. “When you apply artificial intelligence on behalf of customers and experts it's a game changer—you're really designing for humans and their experience.”
Tackling the online shopping boom
Even stuck at home, there are some things we can’t do without—groceries, toilet paper, laptop chargers, or maybe even jigsaw puzzles. With stores largely shuttered, e-commerce experienced a surge.
AI already played an important role in ecommerce to enhance the customer experience prior to COVID-related restrictions—with smart product recommendations, AI-powered customer service and shopper personalization. But the recent e-commerce boom has made the need for AI more evident than ever.
With significant orders, shipping delays, cancellations and more, businesses have been overwhelmed with unprecedented call volumes. And their response has been complicated by the fact that pandemic has thinned or emptied contact centers that usually tackle these queues. Businesses had to think fast to adjust, and many turned to AI solutions to handle the influx of inquiries in the form of chatbots and interactive FAQs.
These solutions will likely have long-term value. There’s speculation that in-person shopping won’t return to normal; grocery stores predict that online orders will likely remain at double or triple original volumes. This is an inflection point for e-commerce, but only if it can get it right—and AI can help work out the bugs.
Necessity is the mother of invention—an adage that is shining through in the digital service boom during the pandemic. With all of us stuck at home, the future of digitized services has moved to the present.
Intuit, maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint, is a mission-driven, global financial platform company that gives everyone the opportunity to prosper. Visit Intuit.com/technology to learn more about how Intuit is using technology to solve challenging financial problems for consumers, small businesses, and the self-employed.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Intuit.
