From automation to transformation: How AI is reshaping business

Are you using artificial intelligence (AI) to do the same things you’ve always done, just more efficiently? If so, you’re only scratching the surface.

EXL executives and AI practitioners discussed the technology’s full potential during the company’s recent virtual event, “AI in Action: Driving the Shift to Scalable AI.”

“AI isn’t about automation or efficiency,” said Vishal Chhibbar, chief growth officer at EXL. “It’s about driving smarter decisions, improving experiences and creating lasting value. And when AI is built on industry-specific knowledge, it transforms customer experience, operations, and IT in ways that weren’t possible before.”

Accelerating business outcomes

To illustrate these capabilities, EXL demonstrated EXLerate.AI, its AI orchestration platform. By using industry-specific AI agents and large language models (LLMs) to manage and automate complex business workflows, it enables enterprises to achieve a greater return on their AI investments through higher efficiency, enhanced customer experiences, improved accuracy, and increased scalability.

Rohit Kapoor, chairman and CEO of EXL, highlighted the platform’s three core principles:

• The ability to integrate AI seamlessly into enterprise workflows
• A strong foundation based on data and domain expertise
• An open architecture that allows for flexibility for rapid innovation

“It’s designed to help enterprises unlock AI’s full potential and accelerate business outcomes,” Kapoor said.

The use of agentic AI, which relies on domain-specific logic and real-time data to validate and correct its outputs, makes EXLerate.AI more autonomous than traditional AI platforms. It goes beyond automating existing processes to instead reimagine new processes and manage them to ensure greater efficiency and compliance from the get-go.

Wyatt Bennett, AI platform product lead at EXL, walked event attendees through the platform’s dashboard, demonstrating how users can easily select the LLMs and data sources they want to use, deploy connectors to third-party data sources, and even configure integrations with internal knowledgebases to create retrieval-augmented generation solutions.

“The EXLerate.AI platform enables teams to quickly spin up new agentic solutions while simplifying the configuration of common foundational components,” Bennett said.

Attendees also saw demos of Code Harbor, EXL’s generative AI-powered code migration tool, and EXL’s Insurance LLM, a purpose-built solution to the industry’s challenges around claims adjudication and underwriting.

AI’s ‘enormous opportunities’

In one of the event’s panel discussions, “Staying Ahead in the Age of AI: Practical Lessons from Visionary Leaders,” AI practitioners shared how they’re using the technology and the benefits they’ve seen.

Alexandra Hordern, general manager, regulatory and consumer policy at the Insurance Council of Australia, said AI expedites claims processing and frees up teams to perform more valuable work, leading to better outcomes. She also highlighted its potential to make fraud detection and prevention more efficient, reducing costs for customers.

“AI has enormous opportunities to transform the way that general insurers and other businesses are operating in the economy,” she said.

Jeffery Eberwein, chief solutions and data officer at Avant Insurance, agreed, adding that his organization is working with healthcare providers to improve services through AI-powered advancements such as enhanced radiology scanning and automated scribes.

“Not only are we focused on how we can improve internally our processes as an insurer, but also supporting our doctors through advocacy and education as to how they’re using it in their practices,” he said.

Enterprises that are best able to scale their AI initiatives will have the biggest competitive advantages, said Troy Williams, Asia Pacific digital leader at ISG. Working with third parties that specialize in data and process automation and focus on outcome-based operating models will also help them gain an edge, because most businesses don’t operate in that way.

“What we’re seeing is a movement towards one-to-one, personalized experiences leveraging generative AI as a way of engaging with those customers at a personal level,” Williams said. “At the same time … it’s really a matter of scale, and moving those generative AI capabilities to the market at scale.”

Working with partners — and making intentional choices about whether to build or buy certain solutions — can help enterprises achieve this scale quickly, said John Kim, chief data officer at Zurich Australia.

“We certainly don’t believe we can build every single bit of our AI ecosystem, so we’re quite conscious about what we decide to build internally, what we’ll adopt, and what we’re going to buy,” he said.

AI as a competitive differentiator

Advancements in generative and agentic AI are empowering organizations to rethink processes, modernize systems and streamline workflows. The businesses that combine these technologies with high-quality data and domain expertise will be best equipped to turn AI from a tool into a true competitive advantage.

To learn more about what AI can do for your business, visit exlservice.com.