Dr.dat. Baiba Apine

Director, IT Consulting, PwC Latvia

For more than a year, PwC has been supporting its customers implement artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that streamline day-to-day work with Microsoft's Copilot technology. We do not code anything in particular, but we help you find a solution that works well by using the customisation options available. Such technologies enable companies to increase their efficiency and adapt to the dynamic market environment.

Many companies have already tested one or two AI licences and often come to the conclusion that the technology is not yet developed enough for widespread use. However, such an opinion may be premature. It's worth thinking about how AI could be used in different scenarios before dismissing it outright.

In PwC's annual survey of business executives, according to the survey, which is presented annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 56 per cent of managers reported increases in efficiency in the past year and 32 per cent reported increases in turnover. Although expectations were higher and AI has not yet been integrated into core business activities on a large scale, 47 per cent of managers plan to do so in the coming year. This indicates a large untapped potential.

Artificial intelligence is a great helper for small tasks such as sorting emails, analysing large documents, searching for answers to questions and translating. Artificial intelligence is able to collect information from a variety of sources and reformulate texts to match posts on social networks. In production, AI is used for quality control to recognise deviations from the norm. A revolution is yet to come, but evolutionary improvements are obvious.

While AI is designed to generate new content in the form of text, images and music, in practice it is much more useful for reducing costs. There is already so much content in the world that humans can barely keep track of it, so the added value of AI in this area may not be so great. A huge amount of new content is generated every day, such as more than 500 hours of video uploaded to the YouTube platform every minute. And so we come back to the use of AI to reduce costs, across the whole company and not just for one or two licences for a few people.

To successfully introduce AI into your organisation, you first need to determine your organisation's AI maturity level. In other words, the organisation needs to understand the extent to which it is ready to accept and expand the use of AI. This assessment can be used to determine what stage the organisation is at and what steps need to be taken to successfully integrate AI technologies into its processes.

The next step is to define clear goals for the implementation of AI that align with the organisation's strategy. You should then select pilot projects that support these goals. For example, if the goal is to reduce costs by eliminating the need to hire assistants and assigning them to perform AI, there are a number of pilot projects where employees from different departments use AI on a daily basis and measure the results - labour savings.

The third step is to assess and adapt the cloud infrastructure, because AI is a cloud-enabled technology.

Finally, it is important to implement responsible AI practices to ensure the lawful, ethical and reliable use of AI technologies. The organisation's lawyer or compliance specialist must review prototype scenarios to ensure that the organisation's operations comply with the law.