AI Facts and Myths
AI is not a recent invention of the human race, rather the technology has been around since the 1980s.
Below is a real story, with placeholders being used for actual organizations involved in the AI project of a business subsidiary of TATA.
Heritage Telecom (HT) was performing contract management and revenue assurance (RA) manually, which was proving to be inefficient. Revenue opportunities were missed, as clause(s) would be forgotten during contract negotiation. Revenue leaked due to non-enforcement of penalties, arising from contractual violations.
HT is a global giant having been in business for over a century. HT has millions of business to business (B2B) contracts, across geographies. RA embarked on a journey to automate human processing of contracts, to bring an average six days of human processing to the minutes of Al processing. Consequently, minimizing revenue leakages. But RA soon found its chosen software and vendor, struggling to scale up. The project was at risk of being scrapped due to an unstable system. HT & TATA were at risk of losing revenue, if software could not be scaled up. TATA being an implementation partner of HT, in 2017 formed a team to work collaboratively with vendors and build a robust software system.
The vanilla version of software was transformed into fit for the purpose software system. After many changes and upgrades on the vanilla version, along with hardware uplifts, HT went live in Aug 2019 with over a million contracts and 300+ users. The system was robust enough to allow resource intensive AI processing to co-exist with user interface (UI) text searches (same as Google), over a million contracts. Compare this to the vanilla version of 2017, when a few minutes of AI processing tripped(crashed) the system. Since 2019 a new line of business (LoB) has been introduced, with more queuing behind to join the system.
Since go-live, the system has expanded itself by successfully adding a second UI and stores a 1.5+ million contract. In 2021, the system had major upgrades which allowed a few more million contracts. HT materialized the financial benefits of £1.5M+, by 2020. It broke 8 figures before the middle of 2022.
HT had successfully augmented humans with Al capabilities - replacing human limitations with Al processing and using Al driven info to supplement human decision-making during contract negotiation.
Hopefully, the above story helps us see the truth and dispel the myth of hype (AI will over take humans etc) created for commercial gains.
Author : J. Banerjee