People everywhere are feeling the pinch of inflation—can AI help ease the pain?
This summer, grocery prices soared 13.5% year-on-year, marking the steepest increase since 1979, according to CNN. And when multimillionaires are sounding alarms about the price of produce, you know something’s out of balance (OK, maybe several things).
People everywhere are feeling the pinch of inflation—can AI help ease the pain?
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We engineers are problem-solvers by nature. So when I went to the store the other day and discovered pomegranates going for $5 apiece, I started thinking: Could AI help fight inflation and other economic woes?
No one loves inflation—whether it’s demand-based or cost-based, inconvenient or catastrophic. By the same token, few of us are fans of recessions, high unemployment rates, supply chain meltdowns, geopolitical violence, bank failures, or anything that disrupts our ability to get through life with a sense of material safety.
The other ones and zeros
One thing that has changed since 1979 is the range of sophisticated automation tools at our disposal. Well-designed and intelligently deployed automations can increase efficiency, reduce waste, and optimize human talent across nearly all economic sectors.
Does widespread adoption of such tools have the power to influence inflation? Absolutely—and in many different ways.
Highly digitized companies benefit from accurate real-time information, making it faster and simpler to audit processes and supply chains, identify vulnerabilities, and deliver insights to stakeholders. And as demands for transparency escalate, digitization allows businesses to meet their reporting and compliance obligations with confidence.
AI is useful for both assessing and managing risk. By parsing large amounts of unstructured data, intelligent systems can identify existing vulnerabilities and predict the likelihood of future problems. They can recognize patterns at a larger, more comprehensive scale than an individual human and anticipate threats ranging from cybersecurity threats to supply chain disruptions. At scale, the economic benefits can be immense.
The pandemic shined a bright light on our complicated, wasteful, politically vulnerable supply chains. When there’s a global shortage of microchips, scarcity pricing dominates everything from laptops to household appliances to cars. You can apply the same logic to commodity crops like wheat and rice—or infant formula. Or, yes, toilet paper.
Beyond chatbots
We also see deflationary effects when organizations use automation to improve customer experiences. These technologies make it easier for entrepreneurs to launch businesses, grow revenue, and gain customer trust.
Utilizing omnichannel support, such as mobile-based virtual agents that can swiftly resolve issues, is becoming a common benchmark for assessing the customer experience. Search and query data also allow content marketing automation tools to reuse content and customize ads in real time based on user behavior. This can help organizations boost revenue and impact. sincrease not only its revenue but also its impact.
The goal of automation is not merely to digitize manual labor, but to generate insights that might otherwise be impossible to acquire.
Businesses also benefit from product and customer integrity metrics such as customer lifetime value and customer effort score. These insights allow business analysts to project changes in core metrics such as profitability and turnover ratios. Executives can then use this information to gain a holistic understanding of their company’s strengths and weaknesses. Few of these insights are attainable without advanced automation.
The goal of automation is not merely to digitize manual labor, but to generate insights that might otherwise be impossible to acquire. Many of these tools are strikingly user-friendly and intuitive. Nowadays, business users can easily create bots to automate tasks like processing invoices, running payroll, and even providing customer support. This results in higher customer satisfaction, which leads to business growth, without having to increase department headcount. This can be the difference between success and failure, especially for smaller firms operating in an inflationary environment.
In short, intelligent automation is a key business tool and a vital hedge against inflation. It provides cost benefits and makes businesses more resilient during challenging economic cycles. For all these reasons, automation should be a strategic pillar for all companies.
