AI tools with practical business applications are growing in number, power, and accessibility. The businesses that succeed in leveraging these tools for tasks like data mining, inventory management, and digital marketing have the opportunity to see significant cost savings. According to the IBM Global AI Adoption Index, 54% of businesses surveyed say that AI technology has already helped reduce the cost of key business processes.

But AI technology is not enough, on its own, to improve your bottom line. Human stewardship remains essential to achieving cost savings without compromising quality, consistency and productivity. 

This is where a strong Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) partner can be invaluable. Even as businesses come to rely on AI tools for speed, efficiency, and automation, business success will remain dependent on human quality assurance, exception review, and support. Leading BPO’s typically employ a strategy called Human-in-the-Loop (HITL), maximizing the potential of AI technology by placing skilled human beings at key positions in your workflow.

Below, we’ll discuss exactly how your business can maximize cost savings by outsourcing select processes. But first, let’s take a closer look at the Human-in-the-Loop model and why so many businesses are moving toward this approach.

How HITL Strategies Are Helping Businesses Leverage AI

HITL is an approach to AI technology that deploys direct human supervision, support, and quality assurance. AI can help automate, optimize, and accelerate certain parts of your workflow. Used effectively, your AI technology should relieve your in-house team from the burdens of rote, repetitive and routine tasks. 

However, in order to use this technology to actually scale your business activities, you need the engagement and direction of skilled human beings. Real scaling only happens when experienced human beings take control of this technology. 

This is the premise behind the HITL methodology, which fuses the automation and efficiency of AI business solutions with human oversight. The HITL strategy holds that AI-based tools are not designed to replace human beings but to enhance our capabilities.

The reverse is also true. Human beings are required to enhance the capabilities of AI by: 

• Updating and improving data inputs;
• Correcting the misinterpretation data;
• Reviewing and addressing outlier data; and
• Integrating new learning and conditions.

HITL recognizes that AI tools are most valuable when leveraged by skilled and experienced human users.

How AI and HITL Work Together to Lower Business Costs

According to Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey, 62% of businesses say the primary driver for partnering with BPO services is the need to keep up with rapidly evolving technology and digital transformation. 

There’s a good reason for this trend. In order to utilize emergent AI tools to their fullest potential and stay on pace with the competition, you need the support of skilled and experienced human operators.

AI tools offer clear and proven cost-cutting applications. Businesses are using AI to great effect for functions like automated inventory management, generative customer service, data mining, digital marketing, and much more. But human users are vital to ensuring that these functions produce cost savings without compromising the qualities that make your company stand out. 

How Savvy Human Users Improve AI Outcomes

Below, we take a closer look at some of the key roles that human operators play in optimizing the use of AI tools. 

Quality Assurance

Human beings are critical to ensuring that your AI tools are actually performing the way they’re supposed to. Human operators must be present at every step in the workflow, from inputting data requirements to monitoring outcomes, from adjusting parameters to addressing algorithmic biases. 

The quality of your AI tools will depend on how effectively the human beings in your workflow manage these responsibilities. Moreover, as AI technology evolves and best practices shift, human quality assurance will be increasingly vital to keeping your business apace. 

Exception Review

Much like people, AI tools must be given clear instructions in order to do their jobs effectively. With AI tools, those instructions take the form of exceptions—conditions for how to handle occurrences that diverge from the normal and expected workflow. 

But these occurrences aren’t necessarily obvious. Without human oversight, your AI tools may not even recognize these deviations. And even when they do recognize these deviations, your AI tools won’t simply learn how to create exceptions on their own. 

Human operators play this role by examining low confidence data and outliers, creating exceptions for how your AI tools handle these deviations, and ultimately refining the data, accuracy, and precision of your AI tools. 

Implementation Support

While AI tools perform valuable business operations, implementation can be costly, complex, and disruptive. Businesses that integrate these technologies with their existing systems and processes often face an uphill climb toward achieving efficiency and optimization.

Human support can level this hill by providing supervision, training, and troubleshooting during implementation. While AI tools can carry tremendous cost savings, implementation failure can be extraordinarily costly and demoralizing.

It’s important to deploy experienced human operators in order to ease the process of implementation and ensure successful adoption. 

How Outsourcing Can Help Maximize Cost Savings From AI

This is where the true value of business process outsourcing comes into play. Whether your business is implementing new AI tools or looking to supplement the power of existing AI technologies, a BPO provider can help maximize your cost savings by:

• Preventing disruption of productivity during implementation;
• Removing in-house training needs and costs;
• Lowering the need for in-house tech support and maintenance;
• Ensuring AI tools are performing optimally; and
• Reducing the threat of implementation failure. 

In order to maximize cost savings and scale your business using AI technology, consider outsourcing some of these critical human functions to an experienced BPO partner.