How AI can help revive industrial operations from COVID losses?

COVID outbreak has affected many industries with some sectors being affected badly. The infection is hitting associations hard from everywhere throughout the world. Businesses across the globe are adapting to the ‘new normal’ of working remotely.

In this time of crisis, Artificial Intelligence can be a great aid for businesses to boost their operations and increase productivity. This article will discuss how AI can help revive industrial operations from COVID impact.

  1. Demand & supply: Organizations always tend to maintain the balance between demand and supply to avoid excess inventory. In this time of crisis, maintaining this balance is critical to achieving as, even if the demand data is available in the open sources, production is either at a halt or is operating with minimum human support. For industries like manufacturing, steel, factory, etc production, their basic activity, operates with human resources. But organizations who have upgraded themselves to industry 4.0 have AI in place to help and enhance human taskforce. AI can perform the same tasks as that of a man but at a faster pace. AI needs data to learn and during this COVID time availability of current data might be a challenge for the organizations. Organizations are using data to train AI to be representative for it to learn the patterns and intents, for demand forecasting and optimal supply chain distribution.

  2. Administrative jobs: Artificial intelligence can perform admin tasks like scheduling meetings, tech support, issuing refunds, order tracking, etc with accuracy. This way AI supports human resources by enabling them to focus on value-added activities. AI automates the tasks using machine learning. Advanced AI can perform structured and unstructured tasks from its learning algorithm. This capability will allow organizations with a fair amount of work in a short span of time.

  3. Revenue forecasting: Generating revenue in the next few months will be a big challenge for organizations especially for small and medium businesses whose operations are at halt currently because of lockdowns in several parts of the world. Cash flow becomes critical during times like these pushing accounts to maintain data on the path of cash-flows. This data when feeding to AI, will analyze the purpose of cash-flow and forecast the paths where the cash should flow to gain revenue. The data fed or provided must be accurate for AI to predict actionable insights that would benefit the decision-makers. Many organizations are already moving towards revenue loss but with AI they can streamline the cash-flow with profits.

  4. Staffing and infrastructure planning: Because of this pandemic and the worldwide lockdown to maintain social distancing employees are staying indoors. Work from home is followed by several organizations but this method is not applicable to all industries. Industries like manufacturing, automobiles require their staff to be physically present mostly in the production and technical field. AI can benefit these industries to identify the number of staff required to be present in the field so that the operations can continue with the minimum workforce. Following revenue losses, many organizations are laying off staff to balance their revenue profits. AI can be utilized to decide if the number of layoffs is correct, more-skilled employees should retain, and many other decisions.

The artificial intelligence network is working profoundly to deliver its applications in every sector to fight the COVID pandemic. But the AI framework is still at the nascent stage and will take time and data to train themselves to fight the next pandemic with substantially more effectiveness and efficiency.

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