Blog Intel IT Leads AI Integration for Business Transformation
By Xochitl Monteon / 29 Dec 2020 / Topics: Data and AI Cloud Data center
Listen to a deeper conversation with Xochitl Montoeon in this TechTalk.
While IT has traditionally played a behind-the-scenes role in business, digital transformation — now a crucial factor in continuing business success — has brought IT to the foreground. We’re in the midst of a cultural reframing of the strategic value IT can bring to business as emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) take center stage in corporate transformation initiatives.
In terms of emerging technologies, AI applications and adoption have been growing incredibly in the last few years, and to positive effect. AI investments have proven their value in recent months, as companies have been forced to accelerate digital transformation to accommodate the changes brought on by the pandemic. We’ve seen many companies find success in their approach to this new normal through leveraging AI solutions to capture and relay data that allows life to go on in a new way. The surge in telehealth adoption is a strong example of this principle.
Not just technically speaking: Successful digital transformation takes more than IT. Learn how to create an agile business model in this free whitepaper: Change-Capable Organizations Embrace the Human and Technical Sides of Digital Transformation.
Embracing AI at Intel
As AI proves a worthwhile long-term investment for many companies across a variety of industries, industry-leading tech companies are challenged to stay ahead, pioneering the solutions that solve the challenges of the future. Intel has long been an anchor company in the technology industry, and we continue to hold that position as we evolve to embrace the emerging technologies shaping the future of business.
Our technology solutions have enabled our customers to transform and pivot in times of growth and challenge. Having shifted our focus from being a PC-centric company to a data-centric company, IT at Intel is now engaged in a long-term effort to transform our core business processes and systems using AI, understanding that accelerating adoption of future-ready solutions is the best path to helping our customers do the same.
AI solutions for accelerated transformation
With more than a decade of AI investment having already proven profitable, our AI vision is to accelerate solutions for the company’s most critical business challenges across product development, manufacturing, sales and the supply chain. By capitalizing on the power of AI, we intend to achieve three primary objectives:
- Improve and predict business outcomes. By using AI to analyze and validate vast amounts of data, we have insights that aid human judgement and help identify new markets, products and features. It also enables us to optimize pricing, demand and supply — for increased forecasting accuracy and growing our business.
- Design better products and services. AI enables us to deliver better power, performance, design efficiency and overall quality. We can leverage it to improve the hardware implementation of Intel’s products (including both back- and front-end design), tasks like design layout (e.g., clock gating), product functionality projections and more.
- Optimize product build and manufacturing. Using AI insights will help us reduce product cost, time to market and make product milestones more predictable. We’re collaborating to prove concepts with clear, validated business value that has led to scaling current solutions. As a result, we have rapidly expanded our AI efforts across businesses with visibility and sponsorship from our leaders.
Intel IT: Improving critical processes with AI
IT at Intel plays a critical role in ensuring our AI goals come to fruition. Here are just a few examples of big-impact AI transformations Intel IT has helped us accomplished so far:
- Improving product validation
Product validation is a labor-intensive process, and Intel’s product complexity is growing exponentially as more capabilities are added into increasingly smaller products. To address this challenge, IT developed an AI hardware validation platform composed of more than 50 machine learning algorithms, running on terabytes of data per week. The platform enabled us to accelerate and improve the validation process and to optimize resources used by selecting specific tests to execute based on targets.
This solution demonstrates that AI can improve processes that were previously performed manually. And when expert engineers are no longer tied to manual tasks, they have more time to focus on innovation.
- Sales AI Platform
As businesses grow, meeting the needs of new markets, customers and partners can be challenging. Sales and marketing organizations are constantly under pressure to effectively cover accounts and rapidly respond to customers’ changing needs while maintaining — or even reducing — operational costs. Intel’s sales and marketing group faces similar challenges while growing in new markets and domains and evolving its existing business.
To meet these challenges, Intel IT developed Sales AI, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform that enables Intel to significantly scale its sales activity. Sales AI collects and interprets customer and ecosystem data, then translates it into meaningful and actionable insights.
Intel IT developed two applications that use the Sales AI platform:
Sales Assist provides insights (referred to as assists) to account managers. These assists broaden account managers’ opportunities to better interact with customers and increase efficiency so they can cover more accounts.
- Streamlining the supply chain
Intel’s supply chain includes 600 facilities in 63 countries, 19,000 suppliers and 2,000 customers. Each year, we fulfill one million orders and ship one billion units. Our solutions use big data, advanced analytical algorithms and machine learning to keep Intel one step ahead of supply and demand by helping to: 1) optimize parts inventory, 2) reduce bill of materials costs for new systems and boards and 3) improve the accuracy of space planning. These solutions help us plan as far as 10 years in advance.
Autonomous Sales creates automatic sales motions, which are actions that Intel offers a customer or partner through an email, website ad or newsletter. Whether or not a customer chooses to take an action teaches us about their needs and interests. Autonomous Sales operates daily and automatically, with no human intervention. It applies to all partners’ accounts, even if they are not covered by an Intel sales team.
Together, these Sales AI applications are generating significant business value to Intel. The incremental contribution of Sales Assist to the opportunity pipeline is estimated to be greater than USD 100 million per year, while Autonomous Sales is helping create USD 20 million in new sales annually
The future of AI at Intel
While no one can predict where AI will be in five years, we have a vision of where we’d like to be. Starting with transformation of our core products and solutions, our ongoing goals include providing AI as a Service throughout Intel’s many smaller teams and organizations, pursuing vender and partner AI collaborations to optimize B2B operations and extending our support to community-based AI projects that help solve the challenges beyond our own doors.
Xochitl Monteon
Information Technology Vice President and Global Manager, Global Supply Chain and Chief Privacy Officer, Intel
Xochitl is the IT VP and GM, Global Supply Chain and Chief Privacy Officer at Intel. She has more than 20 years of cybersecurity and risk management experience across multiple disciplines and industries.
