An arms race is raging in the AI industry -- every organization is frantically investing in or investigating how the large language models (LLMs) that powers Generative AI can be applied to the enterprise. Generative AI will be on every organization's digital transformation roadmap....
Digital assistants are taking a larger role in digital transformations. They can improve customer service, providing more convenient and efficient ways for customers to interact with the organization. They can also free up human customer service agents by providing quick and accurate responses to...
In contemplating digital transformation program investments, executives ask two things: What is the current state costing us, and does it make economic sense to fix it? Transformations seek to improve some aspect of the customer experience or the backend processes that enable that experience. I...
A critical step in digital transformation is to enable the free flow of information throughout the enterprise. But various forms of friction can obstruct this flow. Friction is anything that slows down information access, information retrieval or information manipulation. One of the most obvious...
Knowledge graphs are pretty hot these days. While this class of technology is getting a lot of market and vendor attention these days, it is not necessarily a new construct or approach. The core principles have been around for decades. Organizations are becoming more...
Knowledge management has had a bad rap. For the past few decades, it has gone through cycles of popularity after being introduced in the early 90s, and in some of those cycles, it has been significantly devalued. That is the online incarnation of KM....
I have been trying to upgrade my iPhone for the past two months. You would think that would be simple -- I would log into my account that I have Verizon and order the upgrade. But things started to go wrong pretty quickly. Problems...
A few years back, I was attending an executive presentation of project findings and recommendations for an outdoor products manufacturing company. The project remit was defining the future state digital architecture and a high-level plan to support the organization's transformation of the customer experience....
Is AI driving digital transformation? Or is digital transformation driving the adoption of AI? Are they synergistic, or just getting in the way of each other? Numerous studies show that large organizations are realizing only limited success in digital transformation projects. For example, BCG and...
The holy grail of digital transformation is the seemingly conflicting goals of high levels of customer service and pressure to reduce costs. “Digital Transformation” has become an all-encompassing term – in a piece in this column about customer data platforms, I asked whether the...
Nowhere is the case for metrics stronger than in digital transformations. The most sweeping and comprehensive transformations are the most effective, but the fact that they take place over years and not months means that the full effect is not felt for a long...
Digital Transformation (DT) and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) both entail a great deal of confusing, ambiguous and catch-all terminology that does very little to help prospective buyers make decisions. In fact, it amounts to buzzword soup. The boundaries of digital transformation are vague, and...
Aligning AI’s capability with your sales team Artificial intelligence has the potential to vastly increase the power of sales. It won’t replace salespeople; instead, it will allow them to spend their time on the right prospects at the right time, empowered with exactly the right...
When it comes to the big launch of a customer-focused digital transformation program, such as building a new e-commerce site or revamping customer-service protocols, the IT department, contractors, merchandisers, and marketers usually get the things over the line through acts of heroics, working nights...
In customer experience, the most difficult challenge is the gap between desire and execution. We all want to deliver a better experience. So why can’t we? At the root of this problem are information systems that are not configured to deliver the ideal experience. Since...