By Keshav R. Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS
When Thomas Friedman speaks, the world takes serious notice, and rightly so. I wholeheartedly concur with his assertion that Generative AI represents a profound turning point in history – a true “Promethean moment.” In capturing the essence of this technology, he succinctly sums up the unprecedented opportunities it has created for global businesses. Allow me to share his quote below:
“…This is a Promethean moment we’ve entered – one of those moments in history when certain new tools, ways of thinking or energy sources are introduced that are such a departure and advance on what existed before that you can’t just change one thing, you have to change everything. That is, how you create, how you compete, how you collaborate, how you work, how you learn, how you govern and, yes, how you cheat, commit crimes and fight wars….”
As a business leader, here are my top three insights on this exciting development.
#1 – Powering Countless Solutions
Over the years, we have witnessed the rise of groundbreaking technological assets that have enabled us to deliver tailored, end-to-end transformative solutions to organizations worldwide. Among these advancements, Generative AI stands out as an exceptionally thrilling technology. Today, it plays a vital role in the solutions we develop, combining domain and industry expertise, cutting-edge technology, data and analytics capabilities, and process expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a real-world example: Imagine a contact center where customer queries flood in from various channels. Traditional approaches may struggle to handle the sheer volume of requests and provide accurate responses in real-time. This is where Generative AI, as an enabling technology, comes into play.
At WNS, we have created a Knowledge Assist system powered by Large Language Models (LLM). These models have been trained on a vast knowledge base of contract documents and guidelines, enabling our applications to search and retrieve relevant information quickly. By incorporating a custom-built recommendation engine, we can provide tailored responses to customer queries with remarkable accuracy and efficiency. This approach offers several benefits. Firstly, it drives up to 50-60 percent process efficiency in handling customer calls, leading to cost reduction. Secondly, it enhances the overall quality of customer engagement, resulting in improved CSAT scores due to the higher quality of responses provided. Lastly, it reduces response time significantly, as the LLM model can process data and generate a draft response within seconds.
#2 – Enabling Enterprises to Re-imagine Business Outcomes & Models
AI, encompassing Generative AI, in particular, presents an extraordinary opportunity for businesses. Take insurance, specifically subrogation, for instance. We know how complex and time-consuming subrogation processes can be. Traditionally, claims handlers are burdened with manually reviewing vast volumes of multi-lingual text documents to assess the severity of damage and determine potential recovery opportunities.
Enter Generative AI! At WNS, we have developed Subrogation Assist, which harnesses the power of advanced GPT-based LLM models to help insurers transform the subrogation process. These models are trained to analyze and extract structured information from complex text documents across multiple languages. By leveraging natural language processing capabilities, the models can comprehend the nuances and context within the documents, identifying key details related to the incident, liability and potential recovery prospects.
The benefits are manifold: 20-25 percent improved productivity, as claims handlers no longer need to spend valuable time reading through extensive notes. Instead, they can rely on the AI model to predict the severity level. By leveraging AI, Subrogation Assist eliminates human bias that often leads to inaccuracies. Lastly, the AI model can extract metadata from the handler’s notes and predict recovery opportunities, resulting in a 20-25 percent improvement in recovery rates.
While there are apprehensions that AI may gradually replace certain aspects of our operations, it simultaneously opens up new avenues within the “addressable market” that can be outsourced. It enhances solution scalability and enables us to extend our reach to broader market segments. Our talent pool has witnessed exponential growth in skills while we have cannibalized third-party software deployment through AI adoption.
#3 – Harnessing the Human Touch to Drive Contextualization
It is essential to recognize that Generative AI requires experts with specialized skills to seamlessly integrate it into operational processes, ensuring the right contextualization and achieving the desired outcomes. We are actively engaged in multiple Generative AI pilots and proofs-of-concept, collaboratively built with our clients. Ongoing cross-functional research is conducted within our centers of excellence, Co-creation Labs and across our business transformation teams.
The concept of Generative AI is not new. Smart compose, deep learning and predictive AI are earlier versions of this phenomenon. What is notable is the exponential increase in the model size and complexity. An LLM can be trained and contextualized for specific domains. However, it will need an expert “human touch” to create such personalization vital for businesses to grow and thrive – and that is a mind-blowing opportunity for business transformation partners.
As Friedman rightly said, “…you can’t just change one thing, you have to change everything.” Many organizations lack the time, resources or change management capabilities required to undertake comprehensive design, implementation and operationalization of such changes. This is precisely where providers like WNS step in, armed with our exceptional process expertise, resource availability, technology integration capabilities and profound domain knowledge.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.