Unlocking AI Success: NTT DATA & Microsoft Lead the Way

Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to reinvent work processes and boost productivity, and organisations can experience many of those benefits today.

This was the core message of the webinar Unlock AI Success, delivered by NTT DATA and supported by Microsoft.

NTT DATA's Senior Director for Employee Experience David Hanrahan started by defining AI as any technology that is taught to think for itself and make decisions like a human.

He reminded the audience that AI had already been used in business in assistive and predictive roles for some time, but that the rapid of emergence of generative AI coupled with the digitisation of businesses, had enabled them to leverage vast amounts of data to create new content and take additional actions, with generative AI having become the fastest technology to reach 100 million users.

Hanrahan also advised that maximising the value of AI required an understanding of the potential risks it posed regarding the appropriate use of data and outputs.

As for the potential for AI within organisations today, Microsoft's Senior Specialist for Modern Work Mario D'Silva demonstrated several use cases for Microsoft's Copilot AI service, such as summarising and rewriting documents and generating a presentation from a written document.

D'Silva also stressed the work Microsoft had undertaken to ground its tools in responsible usage principles and to establish protections for the treatment of clients' data, including copyright protections.

Hanrahan said NTT DATA's own experience with generative AI was centralised within a Centre of Excellence which was creating the skills needed to establish an architecture for the deployment of AI. He described several use cases that emerged from this capability, including one that could monitor and report on the condition of dementia sufferers.

This work meant NTT DATA could assist clients to develop use cases using Copilot and related technologies by running adoption workshops and performing readiness assessments, and take them from concept to deployment quickly and safely.

"Copilot is a really great place for organisations to start," Hanrahan said. "It has democratised and made easy access to AI, and the security model makes it very controlled."

He added that greater benefits could be found when organisations began designing AI programs around specific roles.

Hanrahan finished by describing the benefits that NTT DATA had witnessed, including average savings for workers of 30-40 minutes per week using Copilot, but he stressed that these initial benefits were just the start of a more fundamental change.

"This is not an IT-driven outcome, this is business changing," Hanrahan said. "Business process application modernisation all comes together under this heading of AI."

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it on-demand here