Has Data, AI and Bots Brought Us Closer Than Ever To Achieving The Modern Day KITT Car?

Bots In Our Personal Lives

In recent years, we’ve all gotten used to bots helping us manage our home and social lives, finding ourselves asking them to call a friend or turn off the kitchen lights. Bots can be used to play our favourite music, set reminders or alert us when something happens. For example, I have my mobile phone open my DIY shopping list every time I arrive at my local hardware store and to remind me of what to buy and check for the latest voucher they’ve emailed me. I know that using these bots isn’t for everyone, and some people see it as an invasion of privacy; however, personally, I’m a fan and, ultimately, you can always turn them off.

Where Are Bots In Our Workplaces?

Despite bots’ prominence in our day-to-day lives, bot technology has yet to truly find its role in the workplace. We still miss deadlines, forget that meeting we should have attended – or worse, fail to see when a key performance/risk indicator fell below a critical level. In a previous life, I was a risk manager in a UK bank, and it was very difficult to monitor the key risks facing the business. We could conduct scheduled periodic testing to check if risks were being effectively mitigated, but our lives would have been much better if we could have set up automatic alerts to notify us when limits were breached or targets achieved. Knowing that we would be notified when something was going wrong would have been very reassuring. We would have been able to concentrate more on analysing trends, looking for patterns and ensuring that developing risks could be quickly identified and dealt with.

Having Bots in Our Workplaces: Qlik Insight Bot and Ping Intelligent Alerting

The good news is that the benefits of bot technology can now be easily introduced into your workplace, together with advanced alerting to notify you when your requirements or criteria have been met. The Qlik Insight Bot, combined with Ping intelligent alerting from our latest acquisition of RoxAI, allows you to ask questions of your data and receive real-time notifications.

So, imagine this scenario: You are a Customer Relationship Manager at a bank with 50 corporate customers assigned to you. It’s important that your customers have the appropriate credit facilities and cash funds available in order to trade effectively without breaching their overall credit limit. But, monitoring 50 customers, with all their accounts, credit cards, loans and overdrafts, is difficult and takes time. With Qlik’s new real-time alerting, you can now set up alerts that will notify you when your customers are within 5 percent of their credit limit. You can then call the customer to make the necessary arrangements, either increasing their limit or reducing their debt.

The next day, you use the Qlik Insight Bot to check that the appropriate changes have been made for your customer. You could then ask a simple question of the bot and see at a glance your whole customer portfolio. From there, you could drill into transaction details or change the perspective to see the portfolio over time, by geography or even customer type. The Insight Bot will help by making recommendations and automatic comparisons for you. All of this could be done on your mobile phone, tablet or computer. And, if you are a relationship manager meeting with clients, you could download the information you need to your device ahead of the meeting, bringing it with you.

Bringing It Back To KITT

Almost 30 years ago, KITT showed us what bots might be capable of in the future. At the same time, the Internet began to change the way we worked and laid the data and infrastructure foundations for modern systems and bots to work. Today, bots are closer than ever to the vision of KITT and are changing the way we interact – at home and, if we truly embrace bot technology, at work.

It won't be long before we get a bot that is as cool as KITT.