Some of us may wonder? Why should we be listening at all? After all, if your organization is not into law enforcement or crime investigation or psycho-therapy, what does analysing behaviour have to do anything with what you do?

Take a moment and think. Is not your business enveloped around humans in some way? If you could actually study and analyse human behaviour in a well-timed and proactive way, you could actually find this as the best investment of your time, strategy and money.

Consider some examples – of using behaviour to profile:

  1. Customers:

You could find out exact pain-points or things that turn your customers off by analysing their behaviour. You could avoid costly mistakes that deflect valuable customers at the top end of the funnel. You can grasp why a competitor is not able to offer satisfaction to its customer and where can you jump in as a better alternative. You can also segment customers into useful strata – like which ones are likely to buy something from a channel or at a given point in time, which ones are simply window-shopping, which ones can be aimed with specific up-selling and cross-selling offerings and so on.

Behaviour is a big slice of bread and your customers are leaving these crumbs all the time, at every step they take. An enterprise that is able to tailor its product development, marketing strategy, campaigns, and support and service functions to these clues is able to create a bigger edge compared to its rivals.

  1. Risk:

Imagine if you could figure out and separate people who have a tendency to play foul, to make mistakes, to commit frauds, to disappoint your plans or simply, to choose the wrong options. If you are into finance industry and into fields like insurance or loan management, identifying such potential sour-spots can be quite revolutionary for your ability to stay risk-proof. If you are into automotive or road safety, finding alerts based on driver behaviour and driving style can be precious elements for your decisions. (Ex- Driver Behaviour Analytics has been put in a trial mode by Dubai Police.) Even if you are in some other industry, this power can be quite fruitful in spotting aberrant employees, partners and potential alliances. This can help you to fortify your overall risk-defence whether you look at it from an angle of avoiding insider threats, or espionage, or social behaviour-led cybercrime or a failed negotiation. You can be confident of choosing the right people as employees, as collaborators and as industry hand-shakes. All you need to do is sniff the wrong ones out.

  1. Opportunities:

Having a good apparatus to watch and analyse behaviour can also be quite instrumental in thinking of strengths that are not on your current radar. Finding a new gap or unfulfilled need through customer behaviour analytics can reveal an awesome idea of a new product or may be, a new market altogether. Observing a distinct and unusual sign at a negotiating table can unlock a new business deal altogether – something that neither of the two parties had thought of. Small currents and bizarre patterns can arm scientists, economists, regulators, authorities, creators and path-breakers with a good readiness of the macro trends that are still in progress but will shape into a solid state someday.

AI Strengthens Behaviour Analytics

As we can reckon, behavioural analytics has its umpteen uses. Plus, finding these customers, risk cracks and opportunities is not implausible anymore. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The advent of AI has opened new avenues for behavioural analytics to shine. It is through AI that analysing behaviour has become:

  1. Affordable
  2. Scalable
  3. Simple
  4. Integrated
  5. Contextual
  6. Strategic

Let us expand on these specific areas with examples as we try to understand why and where AI is empowering humans with behavioural analytics.

Use-Cases of AI-backed Behaviour Analytics

  1. Mental Healthcare: In a study by an Due psychoeducator and behaviour analyst; it was noted that it is not enough for practitioners to rely on their judgement for determination of behaviour improvement with any intervention. This is for cases like autism, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), learning difficulties or mental health issues. AI models could eventually support practitioners in making better decisions about the effectiveness of their interventions. It was observed that by improving decision-making, practitioners should more rapidly and accurately identify both effective and ineffective behavioural interventions.
  2. Marketing: Digital and physical behaviour are being analysed by marketers to predict intent, detect abandonment chances, find patterns in social sentiment data, grab anomalies, predict purchase probability and transaction value, extract insights from social listening, dial up/down marketing decibels, personalize marketing efforts and track conversion success. They are then able to accelerate the customer journey from intent to action. They can even put a figure or idea on the customer’s lifetime value. In an estimate (McKinsey) it has been surmised that AI can unlock $2.6 trillion in business value for marketing and sales functions.
  3. HR leaders: They are using this technology by combining it with psycholinguistics and other profiling techniques. This helps them to zero down on red flags and star performers alike by assessing attitudes, outlook, personalities, and orientations. HR can tap $0.1 trillion value from AI, as predicted by McKinsey.
  4. Banks: They can really find benefits unimagined just a few years back by using AI here. They are marrying AI to underwriting models to address ‘unbanked’ and ‘under-banked’ segments, to improve fraud detection and hence all set to tap $300 billion from AI’s use. $100 billion here would come from channel management alone, $100 billion from risk analysis and another $100 billion from customer-service management.
  5. Cybersecurity techniques: They are now incorporating analysis of attacker behaviour, deviations and suspicious patterns – so that they can create advanced and proactive threat intelligence by using AI. Value areas like User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) are helping companies to strengthen their Security information and event management (SIEM) stance a lot.
  6. Cops: They are testing pilots to pre-empt crime by using AI-powered behaviour analytics. Ex- a system in EU called VALCRI (Visual Analytics for sense making in Criminal Intelligence analysis) that was the outcome of an EU-wide research project fronted by Middlesex University, involving 18 organisations of various expertise from law firms to teams of scientists. It brought in the idea of ‘intelligence-led policing’ – through help with likely lines of inquiry for detectives, and reducing human error or biases.
  7. Manufacturers: They are using AI to forecast failures, reduce downtime and improve production yields. They can gain $100 billion from using AI in predictive maintenance, $100 billion in inventory and parts optimization, $100 billion in yield optimization, and $50 billion in sales and demand forecasting.

Tap AI, Sharpen Analytics of Behaviour

AI means an investment that can open up trillions in business value. Like the McKinsey Global Institute found out through 400 real-world examples, it can unlock potential value worth $0.2 trillion in risk, $800 billion in retail, $300 billion for manufacturing, $0.2 trillion in service, $0.1 trillion in Finance and IT, and $0.1 trillion in product development. In the lens of Gartner, AI-driven business value has been slated to expand to $3.9 trillion in 2022. Herein, decision automation was also expected to grow to 16 percent by 2022. Remarkably, it has been augured by Gartner that by 2021, new revenue will become the dominant source. It has been pointed out that companies would uncover business value in using AI to increase sales of existing products and services, as well as to discover opportunities for new products and services. In the long run, the business value of AI would be strongly about new revenue possibilities.

Customers, Risks or Opportunities – they all ultimately translate into business value. That explains the excitement and investment in AI-led behavioural analytics. Whether it is Netflix showering its users with exact and smart recommendations or a psychotherapist in the US helping an ADHD patient or the uniforms at Dubai Police or the West Midlands Police Force that are getting proactive and more intelligent – AI is redefining a lot of decisions. How about your decisions?