AI interest is there, but the tech isn’t easy to adopt, firms say

When Converge ICT Solutions, a telecommunications service provider in the Philippines, was looking to leverage AI for its business, its chief executive adviser, Eugene Yeo, found the task tough.

One of the greatest hurdles the company faced, according to Yeo, was preparing the data to feed the AI model.

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Converge had to pull data from nine disparate systems and ensure it was accurate enough for AI models such as Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot to make sense of.

“If you don’t [even] have accurate address information about the customer’s location, how are we going to solve everything else?” Yeo says.

Aligning the data sets to a structure that the AI model could ingest took months. The process paid off, eventually, setting the foundation of Converge’s AI journey.

Lifting margins

Yeo shares that the company is looking to use AI to lift its EBITDA margins to a range of 68% to 70%. As of the first half of 2024, its EBITDA margins stood at 60.9%.

With the hype surrounding AI ramping up last year, Converge did not want to wait. It went live with the technology at its contact center in July of this year.

The company recognized the value that AI could bring in augmenting teams and making their lives easier. But there was more than just an adoption curve to navigate. There was a trust issue as well, as employees had to be convinced to believe in the suggestions that were coming out of the AI model.

“In the beginning, a lot of agents weren’t really using the suggestions coming out from Einstein Copilot. But interestingly, within one to two weeks, we started to see that people realized that, actually, these responses made sense,” Yeo recalls.

Similarly, local flag carrier Philippine Airlines started its AI journey earlier this year. However, its own core capabilities were not quite there yet, says Aurea Vidal, chief information officer at the airline company. Right processes had to be put in place across departments for AI to be utilized in the business.

Photo credit: Philippine Airlines

“If not, it is like putting the cart before the horse,” Vidal adds.

Quick wins