Artificial intelligence gives business management systems a major advantage: it helps companies manage and handle information faster and with as little human involvement as possible. With the help of artificial intelligence, processes are created that make it possible to describe the company's activities, plan upcoming work and assign it to the people responsible.
Every time business management systems are used, there are problems with processing and finding information, grouping it and duplication. To control the amount and flow of information, avoid repeated errors or errors in forecasting future work, and ensure correct and timely information processing, you need solutions that not only help the business move in the right direction but also ensure its growth and faster decision-making and reduce the costs of maintaining existing resources.
As smart technologies develop rapidly in Lithuania, business management systems will reach a higher level in the future, requiring minimal human involvement. Lithuanian technologies are growing, learning and expanding, so there is every opportunity to make the right decisions and take a step forward towards new technologies, not backward.
Where Terra IT already uses artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is already at work in our products and research projects. All Terra products share two AI tools:
- AI assistant 24/7Explains how to perform an action in the software, finds data on orders, stock levels and deadlines, prepares documents and reports, and if it cannot find the answer, passes the question on to the Terra IT team.
- Document digitizationPurchase documents, delivery notes and orders – photographed with a phone, sent by email or scanned – get into the system without manual retyping.
AI in every product
- Orders from emails and PDFs are created in the system automatically.
- Suggests how to load the cargo and which vehicle to choose.
- Suggests a selling price based on historical data, and the manager makes the decision.
- Rates carriers and suppliers by the criteria you choose.
- CMRs and other documents, and receipts photographed by drivers, go to the right place and become trip expenses.
- Predicts delays from PTV Map&Guide traffic data and updates the arrival time.
- Purchase documents, freight delivery notes and orders are transferred into the system without manual retyping.
- The AI assistant finds data on orders, stock levels and deadlines, and prepares documents and reports.
- Identifies the likely cause of a failure and the spare part needed.
- Finds similar past failures.
- Forecasts part replacement and suggests restocking – a person makes the decision.
- The AI assistant finds data on projects, tasks and deadlines.
- Purchase documents and orders are transferred into the system without manual retyping.
- Assesses image quality and determines the document type – a poor or unsuitable document is returned to the sender.
- Recognizes fields and tables and learns suppliers' document layouts.
- Finds errors and duplicates, and matches the order, delivery note and invoice.
- Shows how confident it is for each field; the AI assistant answers questions about documents.
- Forecasts demand and stock turnover based on sales history, seasonality and customer behavior.
- When demand or delivery times change, adjusts orders and suggests alternatives.
- Forecasts the profit from selling stock and finds sources of losses.
- The system learns from historical data: fewer errors and better stock levels in warehouses.
- The tenant photographs the meter, and AI reads the value.
- Consumption much higher than usual is flagged even before the bill.
Research projects
Artificial intelligence: what is it?
The frequently used term artificial intelligence often raises questions about what it actually means. Everyone understands that it has to do with computers, but how exactly? What are the benefits of artificial intelligence and how can it help a modern business? Will artificial intelligence understand and be able to perform the tasks assigned to it? Where is artificial intelligence used?
The term itself says what it is: a way of solving problems created artificially, with the help of a computer, which learns by itself from existing data, processes it and offers the most suitable and correct solution, and improves with every answer and every round of data processing, thus reducing the number of possible errors in the future.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a special algorithm created with the help of a computer that solves the tasks assigned to it and learns from them, offering possible solutions based on previous ones. Artificial intelligence is built into business management systems to make the systems easier to manage and reduce manual work, to help group information and to forecast possible scenarios. Its benefits are very large: once it is properly trained and given the necessary information, it can be put to full use in systems where many people currently work on the same task. AI systems are developed to keep business management systems innovative, improve business processes and make employees' tasks easier.
Intelligent systems cover many areas of business and can be applied to almost any task, making repetitive and routine work easier. In day-to-day work, especially when the tasks are ongoing and repetitive, human errors occur that the employees doing the work may not notice. This is where artificial intelligence can find, help with and correct errors, find the places where errors recur, use historical data, provide the most needed information and forecast future actions.
Artificial intelligence is introduced in companies and industries with large data flows that are hard to control, where help is needed to process information, manage its volume, keep up the necessary pace, save time on calculations, and anticipate the plans and actions that ensure work is done on time and correctly.
The history of artificial intelligence
Historical sources contain various myths and tales of iron men with artificial brains who were cleverer than any living person. But such tales will remain tales, as there are no facts to support them. In the 1940s, however, the programmable digital computer was invented – a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning. This device and the ideas behind it inspired a number of scientists to start seriously discussing the possibility of building an electronic brain (artificial intelligence).
In 1950, Alan Turing published an important paper in which he set out his thoughts on the possibility of building machines that think. He noted that “thinking” is hard to define and came up with his famous Turing test: if a machine could carry on a conversation, typed on a computer screen, that could not be told apart from a conversation with a human, the machine was “thinking.” This idea allowed Turing to argue convincingly that a “thinking machine” is at least plausible, and his answers to the most common objections hold up. The Turing test was the first serious milestone in the history of artificial intelligence, the start of the road towards the modern technologies of the 21st century.
The 1956 Dartmouth conference was the moment when artificial intelligence gained its name, its mission, its first success and its key players, and it is widely regarded as the birth of artificial intelligence. The programs developed after the Dartmouth conference were hard for most people to understand: computers solved math problems, proved geometry theorems and learned to speak English. At the time, few would have believed that such “intelligent” behavior by machines was possible at all.
In the early 1970s, the capabilities of artificial intelligence programs were limited. Even the most impressive computers could only solve trivial problems and their various versions. Artificial intelligence developers began to identify several fundamental limits that could not be overcome in the 1970s, although some of these limits would be overcome in later decades.
In the 1980s, corporations around the world adopted a type of artificial intelligence program called “expert systems,” and knowledge became the main focus of AI research. In the same years, the Japanese government heavily funded artificial intelligence for its fifth-generation computer project. Artificial intelligence was successful once again, and its further development began.
In 1982, physicist John Hopfield was able to prove that a form of neural network (now called a “Hopfield net”) could learn and process information in a completely new way. Around the same time, Geoffrey Hinton and David Rumelhart popularized a method for training neural networks known as backpropagation (reverse-mode automatic differentiation). These two discoveries helped revive neural networks.
By 2011, artificial intelligence had finally achieved some of its oldest goals. It was used successfully throughout the technology industry, although behind the scenes. Part of this success was due to increasing computing power, and part to a focus on specific problems and solving them to the highest standards. Nevertheless, the reputation of artificial intelligence, at least in the business world, was lower: for some problems, artificial intelligence was unable to reach human intelligence as had originally been expected. All these factors helped split artificial intelligence into competing subfields focused on specific problems or areas. Artificial intelligence was more cautious and more successful than ever before.
In the first decades of the 21st century, access to large amounts of data (Big Data), cheaper and faster computers and advanced machine learning methods were successfully applied to many problems in every area of business. Big data refers to a data set that cannot be captured, managed and processed with conventional software tools within a given time. It is a huge opportunity for decision-making, insight and process optimization that requires new processing models. The strategic value of big data technology lies not in accumulating huge amounts of data but in specializing in the meaningful data. In other words, if big data is compared to an industry, the key to profitability in this industry is to increase the ability to process data and realize its added value through processing.
Applications
Various solutions built with the help of artificial intelligence can be used in many areas, for example in production or project management systems. Supply robotization with the help of artificial intelligence can also be used in companies that have their own warehouses, many suppliers, a large flow of purchase and sales invoices and many employees. It is meant for companies that need to process large amounts of information and want to avoid errors and unnecessary repetition and save time when exceptional accuracy is required.
The areas where artificial intelligence can be used are unlimited: the algorithm can be trained and adapted to all kinds of fields. Terra IT has started using and training it to help with order management. Based on historical data on previous orders from suppliers, artificial intelligence recommends the most optimal orders, so that warehouses hold exactly the quantity of goods that will be needed.
Application and strategy
AI-based solutions can be used in the business management systems Terra IT develops.
In production and project management systems, it can be applied to supply chain management, bringing together orders, supplier information management and warehouse capacity.
The benefit for every company is visible right away thanks to better data processing and avoiding duplication, and fewer employees are needed for the same tasks.
Artificial intelligence can be applied very widely in other areas too, so we constantly strive to improve and add the latest features to our business management systems. Development and training take a lot of time and require investment and a good team, but once all the plans are implemented, the results pay for everything: innovative solutions start improving the quality of business management, cut costs, help avoid errors and create a lot of added value. Programming artificial intelligence takes a lot of time and requires dedicated resources, but the result is worth the work, because it makes business management easier for many clients.
It can be applied both in business management systems, where all the work is done by computer programs, and in manufacturing companies, where robotic equipment works. Artificial intelligence is programmed to perform the necessary tasks, so it can be applied in many areas. These are the technologies of the future that will ensure the prosperity of industry, healthy growth and market expansion.
Tasks and importance
Artificial intelligence is important for solving today's tasks. As systems improve, many of them begin to use artificial intelligence technologies to reduce manual work and the need for human resources. To cover more tasks, solve them faster and deliver useful results with a minimum of errors, technologies are used that train themselves on historical data and past errors. To deliver the best result, large amounts of data are needed; then the answers come closest to the goal.
Artificial intelligence plays a major role in today's world, because the systems of many factories, transport companies, customer service and other areas are being improved to ensure a minimum of errors and an accurate picture of parts requirements, production volumes, stock levels and warehousing. The business management systems being developed are combined and improved together with artificial intelligence and intelligent features. Self-learning systems are an integral part of modern technology and the latest solutions in today's business world.
Artificial intelligence solutions for business: benefits, opportunities and the future
Artificial intelligence used for forecasting and classification tasks is most often applied in practice in real companies. This can mean automatic translation, signature recognition, stock counts and projected volumes. In public spaces, it can also mean traffic flows and their management, vehicle tracking and security.
The possible uses can be enormous, so it is worth defining a few main areas that are the most popular:
- e-commerce – in online stores, from customer service and submitting inquiries to creating the order, passing shipment information to the courier and changing the order status at every stage;
- healthcare services – booking systems, appointment scheduling, work schedules and visits, work and rest schedules;
- industry – from receiving the order and ordering materials to warehousing, logistics services, raw material accounting, downtime and machine operating hours, and forecasting in production or breakdowns;
- transport services – a wide area that can also include the public sector, cargo and passengers carried by various means of transport: aircraft, ships, rail, trucks, buses and more. It is used for route planning, work scheduling and meeting security requirements for cargo and vehicles.
The benefits of artificial intelligence solutions for business can be seen when they are actually used and applied in business. Manual working time and human resources are reduced, because computer systems take over part of the work, and the time needed to solve tasks is shortened, because the algorithms and historical data make it easier to find the information needed for further calculations.
The systems Terra IT develops are being improved so that in the future they can be extended with artificial intelligence modules, giving the systems new and more complex tasks, forecasts and answers to provide.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
What are the latest business management systems with AI?
The latest business management systems with integrated artificial intelligence make it possible to automate decision-making, forecast the progress of projects and orders, and analyze large amounts of data in real time. The experience of Terra IT experts shows that such systems improve process efficiency, reduce errors and give companies a competitive edge.
Which business processes can artificial intelligence be applied to?
Artificial intelligence can be applied to order forecasting, inventory optimization, customer behavior analysis, staff planning and workload distribution. The experience of Terra IT experts shows that integrating AI into business management systems makes it possible to make sound decisions based on real data and forecasts.
Can artificial intelligence forecast orders and business needs?
Yes. Integrated systems with artificial intelligence make it possible to analyze historical data and forecast order volumes, customer needs and resource demand. The experience of Terra IT experts shows that using such systems helps companies optimize their processes, reduce downtime and plan resources more efficiently.