How to make business decisions with AI
By: Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is
revitalizing enterprise software and has become an essential part of the modern workplace. Yet, its implementation and usage remain ambiguous for many. In this context, AI emerges as a key tool for reshaping how we work.Today’s Digital Transformation.
Zoho’s recent survey, “Uncovering Trends in Digital Workplace Transformation” analyzed patterns across demographics and company sizes to assess digital maturity—that is, how efficient and standardized their operational processes are.
Companies with fully integrated technologies demonstrate high digital maturity. Those still reliant on manual or disconnected systems do not.
Larger organizations often face inefficiencies and security challenges due to their complexity, legacy systems, and siloed operational structures.
Moreover, despite adopting advanced tools, many companies fall short due to poor system integration, bureaucratic inertia, slow change management, and increasing vulnerability to cyber threats.
Worse still, many internal processes remain informal and sluggish, hindering innovation and exacerbating security issues. Improving digital maturity requires a clear goal: maximizing intelligence in decision-making.
Beyond Simply Using AI.
Many businesses assume that adopting AI alone will solve their problems. However, real value is unlocked when AI operates in the background—seamlessly integrated into workflows—while delivering relevant and actionable outcomes.
This requires training AI on proprietary, business-specific data. Here is where Business Intelligence (BI) plays a vital role, informing both AI models and human decisions.
The fusion of AI and BI leads to Contextual Intelligence (CI), which enables precise, relevant decision-making. It’s not just about automating tasks—it’s about developing systems that deeply understand the business and surface key insights at the right moment.
The Path to Smarter Decisions.
The convergence of AI, BI, and CI gives rise to a more advanced concept: Decision Intelligence (DI). In this paradigm, employees are freed from routine tasks, enabling them to focus on coordination, trend analysis, and strategic decisions backed by accurate data.
DI leverages custom language models that allocate the right computational power for each task. As a result, business decisions are grounded in data—not guesswork.
One practical example comes from Virtuoso, a luxury travel advisory firm. By implementing a data-driven project management system (DDPM), they significantly improved team visibility, collaboration, and efficiency.
So, how can companies move toward DI? Key recommendations include prioritizing predictive analytics using historical data, ensuring unified systems with real-time updates, and adopting solutions that support asynchronous work—a cornerstone of global agility.
Digitally mature organizations are better equipped to face current and future challenges. They operate with higher levels of intelligence, efficiency, and security, and ultimately, they are the ones that thrive, evolve, and endure.
Not because they possess the latest technology, but because they know how to use it with intelligence, discernment, and purpose. DI is not the final destination—but it is a reliable roadmap in an increasingly volatile world.
Digital transformation is urgent. But buying technology alone is not enough. What’s needed is the development of maturity, intelligence, and direction. Because in the end, the true power lies not in the tool—but in how we use it to make better decisions.
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