What can AI do for your business?

Infobip Regional Sales Engineering Manager, Orediretse Molebaloa

By Koketso Mamabolo

As a former sales executive in the retail sector, Infobip Africa’s Regional Sales Engineering Manager, Orediretse Molebaloa, picked up ‘soft skills’ which have contributed to his successful career. “The experience there taught me how to sell solutions and, most importantly, understanding that product knowledge alone is not enough.” 

The ‘hard skills’ he learned during his studies, through subjects such as software development and mathematics. “These critical skills played a major role in how I approach day-to-day problems that require technology driven solutions.”

Orediretse brings years of telecommunications experience to his role at Infobip, which works in the cloud communications space, focused on businesses. His responsibilities include influencing revenue growth, managing talent and ensuring internal quality of service. 

“My passion for technology stems from my early childhood where I used to fiddle around with home electronics or help family members with their computers. And, of course, video games. I was – and still am – fascinated by the unlimited possibilities that come with technology.”

We asked Orediretse about what artificial intelligence can offer businesses, how it can be implemented successfully and more.

What can AI offer businesses?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. One of the most obvious benefits that AI offers is the ability to provide answers to customers, thus removing the ‘human element’. Engaging in a conversation with a ‘chatbot’ provides a customer with a private experience through self-service. There’s also personalisation which helps organisations analyse multiple sources of customer data in real-time to make interactions as relevant as possible. Lastly, there’s messaging optimisation. By analysing prior engagement history, AI can help send messages via your customers’ preferred channel in particular situations and schedule messages at the best time. AI is just the technology to improve the way organisations handle their customer engagements and requests. Some additional benefits include: 

• Efficiency and resource productivity benefits
• Improved operational rates
• New capabilities, insights, and business model expansion
• Improve customer service
• Proactive customer experience monitoring
• Reduction of human error
• Better talent/resource management

What are the steps businesses can take to successfully implement AI in their business?

The key to implementing AI effectively is through data-driven decision making. Understanding the concept of AI is a core requirement, as it will help businesses understand how to best harness the technology. Organisations need to first analyse their core gaps. Once they have done so, the organisation can identify and understand the problems that the business wants to solve through AI. Furthermore, various trends and insights that stem from this exercise can then lead to incorporating AI to further optimise processes. 

The implemented AI solution should easily translate the business and commercial value it brings. In other words, the ROI should be easily achieved, and there should be clear objectives and priorities that are linked to measurable business outcomes through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKR) etc.

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What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your career and how did you overcome them?

As one might expect, designing and proposing complex solutions is a technically challenging task. Furthermore, your customers expect you to be the subject matter expert, which includes selling commercial value and ROI to executive and C-level stakeholders. To be able to meet all these demands, I need to be constantly up to par with both regional (Africa) and sub-regional (Francophone, East, West, and Southern Africa) market trends. As a result, I have consistently ensured that I upskill myself from both a leadership and technical perspective.

What skills have contributed the most to success in your career?

As a computer systems’ engineering graduate, I covered major subjects such as programming/software development, mathematics, networking and digital logic design. These subjects embody or encapsulate the science and technology of design, construction, implementation, and maintenance of software and hardware components of modern computing systems, computer-controlled equipment, and networks of intelligent devices. These critical skills played a major role in how I approach day-to-day problems that require technology driven solutions. On the soft skills side, I used to work as a Sales Executive in the retail space. The experience there taught me how to sell solutions and, most importantly, understanding that product knowledge alone is not enough. 

What are the challenges that businesses can expect when implementing AI in their business?

A common challenge that organisations are often faced with when embarking on a new AI journey is pushback from employees. It is easy to be afraid of the unknown and the impact AI could have on their future. In an effort to limit employee apprehension, organisations need to remain transparent throughout the AI implementation process, while upskilling their workforce throughout the journey.

Secondly, the digital transformation journey doesn’t belong to one individual or department, it involves multiple contributions from different departments ranging from research & development (R&D), product teams, engineering, etc. They are generally geographically distributed, and the strategy needs to be inclusive of market trends within the different regions.

And lastly, another challenge can be around getting the right resources, starting with the talent to lead the transition. It takes a balance of technology and talent to achieve a successful digital transformation.

How do you get the best value from AI?

One approach to achieving success in customer-centric digital transformation is to clearly define objectives and priorities that are related to measurable business and customer outcomes. Attracting the right individuals and leaders with strong digital and analytical skills is crucial. Investing in essential tools and infrastructure (such as the financing of digital acceleration) is also critical, which is why organisations’ expenditure continues to rise.

How will AI change the future of business?

As organisations are consistently investing in research and development, AI will continue to improve in precision. For example, business availability will no longer be just 8AM to 5PM. AI will take over engagement after hours, allowing your business to potentially run 24/7 while allowing full time resources to not exceed their 8AM-5PM productive hours which promotes a healthy work-life balance. However, this progress must be balanced with open discussions around ethics which range from privacy and security, reliability and safety, fairness and inclusiveness to transparency and accountability.

What books would you recommend to the business community?

• • Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort
  • Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence by Chalmers Brothers, Vinay Kumar & Julio Olalla
  • Choose Yourself! by James Altucher 
  • The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
  • Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineer’s Handbook 2nd Edition by John Care & Aron Bohlig