AI Integration in Business: Balancing Strategy, Customer Experience, and Data Management

When it comes to AI: don't DIY, start with why

Some leaders are turning to DIY efforts to integrate AI into their business, and are on a path fraught with traps, potential snafus, and wasted time. We think there's a better way. The CEO's office is often said to be the loneliest office. The board and investors want them to hurry up, adopt AI and deliver value. Technical leaders are feeling the pressure to be AI experts and deliver returns on AI investments so they're delegating up to the CEO. Customers and employees want them to inject AI into their experiences. Customer expectations are growing. Their last great experience is their new expectation, and they don't want to wait. A whopping 41 per cent of employee time is spent on repetitive low-value tasks, leading to burnout and attrition. To make matters worse, employees are stuck with siloed data and AI that doesn't live up to its promises. It's no surprise they're turning to consumer-grade AI, creating new security risks. All of this pressure creates a perfect storm for CEOs. The urgency to make decisions and take action, with a lack of certainty and even some understandable fears. Our research with YouGov found the key drivers for Australian C-suite execs to integrate AI were boosting productivity and efficiency, innovating customer and employee experiences, and remaining competitive. As businesses have raced to get going on AI, they've put too much focus on the how, and not nearly enough on the why. Every business needs an AI strategy, which must start with the value that's trapped and the use case to un-trap it. The focus should be on areas of trapped value, the functions and tasks where AI can have the greatest impact on the business. It should start with the use cases and work backward, with a focus on speed to value. Leaders should avoid getting stuck on the technology. It can be tempting to obsess over which UI and AI model to choose. We take an agnostic view on this, because what really matters is connecting a company's trusted customer data safely, and that AI is used where it's most needed. Many businesses tell us their data is fragmented, trapped in disconnected systems, and not ready to ensure AI investments are truly effective. A recent Deloitte survey of 2000 leaders found almost 80 per cent of leaders anticipated increasing their investments in data management as they see it as core for AI to be effective. It's critical to unlock the rich organisational intelligence trapped in silos, and making it available to back office and front line workers alike. Data Cloud helps solve this critical problem and has become our fastest growing product. It addresses data fragmentation, and brings trusted data to agents through a technical concept called retrieval augmented generation, which allows us to teach large language models about specific business needs without retraining them from scratch. McKinsey recently estimated 75 per cent of the value of generative AI will come from front line functions, including customer operations, marketing and sales. For most businesses, demand far exceeds their capacity to serve customers. With AI agents, there's no capacity constraint; you can build and deploy quickly, and they work 24/7 for your employees and customers. This allows businesses to scale quickly and frees employees to solve problems critical to the business. We are seeing this play out already with our trailblazing customers. Fisher & Paykel uses agents to resolve 30 per cent of queries, freeing up customer service operators to focus on more complex cases, resulting in estimated savings of 3300 hours per month. AI is finally living up to its potential. It's helping companies improve productivity and efficiency while also delivering a better experience for employees and customers. The fastest, safest, and most sustainable path is to abandon DIY efforts that start with the technology, leverage the investments already in place, identify the most critical, high-impact use cases, and deploy AI agents quickly and easily. We believe this is what AI was meant to be, do you?

C-suites race to onboard generative AI

Despite this, Fillmann says that a majority of Australian C-suite executives remain focused on back-office functions like IT and operations, rather than investing in customer-facing applications. While these back-office investments are necessary to boost productivity and streamline internal workflows, Fillmann underscores the potential downside of an overly narrow approach. "Taking full advantage for the greatest returns requires an equally keen eye towards front line applications." One of the biggest challenges business leaders face is achieving the right balance between cost-cutting and enhancing customer experience. "A lot of companies are asking: how do we boost productivity without compromising customer experience?" says Fillmann. "Stripping out costs, saving time, giving customers the best possible experience with your company - these all help the bottom line." Fillmann says that recent advances in AI have largely solved this challenge by enabling productivity and customer experience to go hand in hand. "Where the technology is now, particularly with the introduction of AI agents, productivity and customer experience no longer have to be trade-offs," he says. The introduction of the company 's Agentforce, he says, allows companies to deploy autonomous AI agents that support employees, effectively acting as an extension of the team. "Agents help reduce the cognitive load on employees, allowing them to focus on the more nuanced and human aspects of their work." AI adoption can be a daunting task, and executives are feeling pressure from both internal and external stakeholders to move quickly. "There's pressure from the board to hurry up and get going, and of course deliver value; and pressure from customers to bring the 'magic' of public AI models to their experiences with companies," Fillmann says. Part of this pressure falls on technical leaders, who often delegate AI decisions upward, seeking guidance from the CEO. He warns against over-complicating AI implementation by focusing on the technology itself rather than the business outcomes it can support. "Companies are spending too much time deciding which UI or model to choose, or even trying to build their own LLM," he says. "The fastest, safest, and most sustainable path forward is abandoning DIY efforts that start with the AI, and instead identifying the most urgent, high-impact use cases that will deliver business value, fast." For AI to succeed, Fillmann stresses, companies need robust, well-managed data infrastructures that address quality and privacy concerns. "Almost every organisation tells us their data is fragmented, trapped in disconnected systems, and not ready to ensure AI investments are effective," he says. As a result, many organisations are spending considerably more on data infrastructure than on AI itself. "Our global study found CIOs are spending four times more on data infrastructure and management as they are on AI," Fillmann says. Without the right data foundation and secure connections to daily business operations, AI cannot transition from a mere novelty to a powerful tool for decision-making and strategy. The company's Data Cloud aims to solve this issue by creating a secure, unified data foundation. "Data Cloud has been designed to tackle these very issues. It's the foundation for every AI transformation and the core of Agentforce," Fillmann says. For business leaders, the challenge lies not only in managing data quality, privacy, and training but in cultivating a holistic AI strategy that aligns with their strategic goals. Fisher & Paykel is leveraging AI on the front line to enhance its technology-driven customer service and maintain a competitive edge. The household appliance leader is exploring the integration of generative AI to streamline support processes and enhance user experience. Chief digital officer, Rudi Khoury, sees customer service as an ideal entry point for generative AI applications, thanks to its high volume of manual, repetitive tasks. These AI tools could help boost efficiencies while enabling customers to resolve issues quickly and independently. Fisher & Paykel is using AI bots to triage customer needs, directing them to appropriate resources and self-service options via tools like Salesforce's Einstein Bot. This innovation, Khoury says, has already yielded positive feedback, with around a third of users choosing to self-serve after interacting with the bot, reducing wait times and improving response rates. However, he stresses that these tools don't replace the human touch entirely, particularly when it comes to quality control and delivering nuanced support. Khoury acknowledges that while AI has significant promise, it also presents challenges, particularly in terms of reliability and data accuracy. "If you're putting generative AI in a customer-facing role, it has to be flawless," he says, adding that any AI-induced errors could harm customer trust, which is paramount in their approach to support. "We don't want any savings to come at the expense of customer experience," says Khoury. To avoid pitfalls, Fisher & Paykel is implementing governance structures and careful oversight to ensure information presented to customers is as accurate as possible. Internally, the AI tools offer productivity boosts, enabling staff to complete tasks more efficiently and focus on higher-level problem-solving. This controlled deployment provides another layer of quality assurance, with humans ensuring AI-generated information is appropriate before it reaches customers. As for data, Khoury describes it as the "oil that fuels AI", stressing the importance of structured, labelled, and consolidated data systems. Fisher & Paykel has invested heavily in data platforms to streamline this infrastructure, understanding that cohesive data sources are fundamental to AI's effectiveness. Rather than feeling pressured to deploy AI in every facet of the business, Khoury says the focus remains on aligning AI solutions with core business goals. For Fisher & Paykel, that means prioritising tools that enhance, rather than replace, the human-centre d service approach they are known for.