Innovative tech for effective crisis management: What you need to know during the COVID-19 pandemic

Featured article by Oksana Mikhalchuk, Technology Writer at Oxagile

65% of CEOs say that they have already experienced a crisis, and 73% of the respondents are sure they will inevitably face one in the years to come, PwC CEO survey stated in 2016.

In 2019, the same research revealed that the number of CEOs who are confident in their company’s growth is as low as 12%. Considering a 2020 pandemic outbreak and economic uncertainty, they weren’t too far from the truth.

To keep your business afloat in turbulent times, you can turn to providers of AI consulting services who will leverage ML and related techs to help you automate business processes, facilitate remote work, revamp talent acquisition after forced downsizing, and forecast upcoming business challenges.

AI-powered automation

AI-driven Robotic Process Automation, RPA for short, is a great fit for redistributing the workload of the office management and optimizing other internal processes during the remote work period.

To wit, you can leverage AI to automate routine procedures like processing employee requests or answering questions regarding IT, benefits, and HR. Intelligent customer-facing chatbots will help you effectively deal with mundane customer requests and transfer valuable data from email and voice interactions to CRM without a human needing to validate it.

Also, if you work a lot with legal documents like contracts, industry regulations, and laws, think implementing intelligent document processing. Powered by natural language processing tech, such a system will help you streamline proofreading, find the right information, extract key points, and register minor changes faster.

Remote work support

There are many solutions like intranets that serve as company-wide collaboration tools. But they are clearly not enough for intense office schedules and fast-paced decision-making. If you intend to keep the same productivity levels when working remotely, AI will help you support an office-like working atmosphere and work speed.

In particular, an AI-enhanced tool will spare you a few hours a day spent on manually scheduling meetings and prioritizing tasks — by analyzing your daily work activity, comparing it to your colleagues’ and setting up meetings at a time that will please everybody.

During a call, a virtual voice-activated assistant will take care of your notes — by creating reminders, adding future events to the calendar, and leaving key takeaways in a shared Google Doc. When you open your inbox the next morning, your emails will already be sorted out from the critical ones to the least important.

Proactive monitoring of IT infrastructures is another example of how AI redefines remote work. This tech allows your IT team to control components like CPU, data storage, traffic, the network condition, and more. And if there are anomalies, errors, or security breaches detected, it will automatically create a ticket for a human specialist or will solve the issue on its own — if previously trained to execute particular recovery actions.

Talent acquisition

When the crisis passes, the hunt for tech talent to fill new positions will continue. And AI can contribute to the hiring process, saving you time and money. It will make the candidate search multidimensional, allowing recruiters to focus on different talent-related goals like diversity, retention, and personalization.

To illustrate, AI can go through a candidate’s skills, personality, and even organizational fit — and provide you only with relevant CVs. If there are cheating signs like a copy-paste text, fake photos, or compromised personal details, recruiters will be notified early on, before the CV in question is taken into consideration.

By adopting AI, HR and recruitment teams will reduce efforts on gathering a high-quality candidate pool, increase the business value of resume search, and boost hiring and working experiences.

Crisis prediction

No matter PR-related or economic, crises will strike again — and you better be ready. Opt for AI to predict the next big downfall, evaluate the risks, and prepare a strategic response plan.

Namely, an AI-enabled brand reputation system fueled with natural language processing will empower you with the information from news, social media posts, and research reports related to your company and the niche you’re in. With this data at hand, you’ll be able to conduct an in-depth analysis of customer sentiments and market trends — identifying the red flags before a reputational crisis arises.

AI-based predictive analytics will empower you to constantly monitor the economic situation in your industry and be in the loop about how other market players react to possible risks. When a disaster like a currency collapse or epidemic outbreak hits, you will have a ready-to-use recovery plan that will spare you the need to hectically choose what to do next.

There’s no better time to get advantage of AI

After recovering from a crisis, you will learn the lessons and be able to rejoin the race, equipped with cognitive technology like AI. This tech will not only help your business survive through hard times — by optimizing business processes and increasing remote work productivity — but also lay the foundation for future success.

About the Author

Oksana Mikhalchuk is a Technology Writer at Oxagile, a New York-based provider of next-gen software engineering solutions around IoT, AI, computer vision, biometrics, and more. Oksana creates content about state-of-art tech opportunities in healthcare, education, entertainment, and manufacturing.