[Authority Magazine] C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Kylie Fuentes Of Zilliant On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans

In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?

We came from a world where AI adoption was challenging because people formed a view that said you needed these very clean, rich, and robust data sets to leverage it. Historically, that’s been a barrier because companies often didn’t have the tools needed to manage data efficiently. But with the latest advancements in AI, that’s less of a problem or hurdle because AI can work with a lot of unstructured data sets.

Now we’re in an age where many companies want to start using AI but don’t necessarily know where to start. It’s still somewhat of an uncharted technology, so we’re all still learning at the same time, we’re in the very early days. In my view, technology is a tool to solve a human problem. Ultimately, the biggest challenge in driving adoption is going to be finding the right use cases where AI can be embedded into the core flow of business processes, remove friction in end-user experiences and deliver an exponentially better outcome than what was possible before.

The other area that we’re starting to see emerge as a barrier is trust. In B2B technology in particular, customers are relying on technology to help them run their business operations. Trusting the outputs of AI-driven recommendations without understanding how they’re generated is a real concern. In the long run, as the technology and comfort levels improve, this will likely go away. But for now, I think B2B tech companies will also have to think about how they can build in features to allow end users to validate or override AI recommendations as a way of overcoming these barriers to adoption.

I’m an optimist at heart, and I believe that in the B2B space, AI is something that is going to change how we deliver solutions, but ultimately, it will be an up-leveling of human productivity and job satisfaction. On a macro level, with new technologies, there is new job creation and new industry creation. And on a micro level, individuals and businesses are looking for AI technology to help free up time from repetitive, task oriented work so they can spend more time doing strategic work that creates market advantage.  

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