COVID-19 presents enormous and unexpected challenges to many organizations across different industries and sectors.

For example, in finance and banking industry, the new products and services offerings have become available to the impacted business and individuals. These new offerings are entirely based on whole new criteria and circumstances that were not foreseen or considered as part of the existing customer journey. Not only there are new offerings but also, the range and types of customers have changed, therefore, services like credit scoring, fraud detection, pricing, and decisions on eligibility, etc. of the customers for these new and existing offerings have changed as well.

Consequently, this represents a massive opportunity for the financial industry to expand their products and services offering for a new range of clients.

In the health industry, because of the continuous changing of circumstances, all the decisions around triaging, the priority of patient, scheduling and planning for beds, nurses, doctors require constant changing and update as situation changes.

Therefore, situation-aware decisions as part of the operation in hospitals are now a critical part of day-to-day activities to ensure they can deal with demands and situations.

In the transportation and supply chain industry, the impact is significant as the demand for delivery has changed, the traditional channels for purchasing goods are challenged and the amount and usages of products have increased. These, in turn, have impacted delivery, routing, packaging, products & stock availability.

Increasing of demands for transportation and delivery will become opportunities when the companies can offer more effective and efficient logistics. i.e. better routing, consistent decisions about pricing and billing.

These situations are not only new to almost every business and organization but also keeps changing as regulation changes, data & information changes, behaviors of customers, and market reaction to situation changes. And on top of these moving and changing circumstances, the uncertainty for post-corona puts the organization in a very difficult if not impossible situation to ensure they can adapt to all these changes and uncertainty.

Why End-to-End Decision Automation?

All these changes and uncertainty require organizations to invest more in end-to-end decision automation for both immediate risk and cost mitigation and long-term measures to address possible future outbreaks. End-to-end decision automation enables organizations to make optimized, situation-aware, and customer-centric decisions.

Let us have a look at the illustration below.

decision-automation-covid-19

end-to-end decision automation to embrace multiple AI technologies

As we see in the model, the context is about information for specific situations on a case, that is built up in the end-to-end decision automation using multiple data sources and information.
The next step is to use AI technologies and combining predictive and prescriptive analytics to model and execute decisions. In many cases then with the help of optimization techniques, we can find the best solution among possibilities.
And the very important step which often is missed is to put the decision results into action. Using Decision Robotics to carry out the tasks, interact with systems, or alternatively asking for domain expert involvements and interventions as part of the end-to-end decision automation.
With monitoring and measuring the results and the outcomes we then can improve the data, modes and possibly understand the situation better to provide a more effective and efficient solution.

Conclusion

The key advantage of end-to-end decision automation in fighting COVID-19 crisis is that the technology enables organizations to cover all the areas of changes; from data and information to regulation and market behavior changes. It also allows fully automated decision or semi-automated that allows domain expert interventions to exception handling or overriding the decision results.

As part of the solutions to end-to-end decision automation, it is very important to ensure all the AI technologies are used in our battle against COVID-19.

For example, have a look at the video below that shows the COVID-19 symptom checker using a decision model and rules to suggest the next-best-action for individuals.

Last updated June 28th, 2022 at 11:06 am, Published April 30th, 2020 at 11:06 am