The company recognizes the urgent need for a major IT upgrade to stay competitive and address customer concerns. The high market pressure emphasizes the importance of adapting to new technologies and implementing a more efficient and modern e$-$commerce platform to maintain its market position and profitability.

The IT team is responsible for ALL aspects of IT$,$ including application, infrastructure, integration, security maintenance and monitoring. IT team is also responsible for application development and enhancements. Currently, the IT team has six months of work backlog and cannot retain talent due to high workload, mundane tasks, and lack of career growth.

The company uses $35$ different applications hosted in $2$ data centers in Canada. Both data centers are $90\%$ occupied and have no space to add additional infrastructure.

The company's IT Technologies are coming to the end of support, and there is no plan to upgrade or replace. Current technologies are unable to meet business and market needs. As a result, many business units in the organization have started their work around solutions by having many offline Excel spreadsheets. In short, the IT Team and Technologies are becoming the bottleneck for business growth.

Executive management expects Digital Transformation to solve Business and IT issues.

AI Application:

E$-$commerce businesses face various challenges, and integrating artificial intelligence $($AI$)$ can help address many of these issues. Here are the top two problems in the e$-$commerce sector and how AI can be applied to solve them:

$$ Personalization:

Problem: Providing personalized experiences for each customer can be challenging without AI$.$ Customers expect tailored recommendations and a personalized shopping journey.

AI Solution: Implement machine learning algorithms to analyze customer behaviour, purchase history, and preferences. AI can then provide personalized product recommendations, targeted promotions, and a customized user interface.

$$ Customer Service:

Problem: Handling a large volume of customer inquiries and providing timely, accurate responses can be challenging.

AI Solution: Use chatbots and virtual assistants powered by natural language processing $($NLP$)$ to handle routine customer queries, provide product information, and assist in the buying process. This can free up human customer service agents to focus on more complex issues.

IT team is very confident that it can develop and deploy this application in $4$ weeks. The estimated cost is $250,000$ CAD.

Operations would like to hire five people to help with personalization and customer service. There is no backup analysis to prove that an additional five people will be used to support the personalization and customer service workload. Per hour per person cost is $35$ CAD.

IT$,$ legal, and corporate prefer AI applications. Operations are convinced that hiring five people will solve the issue. The finance team is only interested in dollar numbers and won't approve the project until they have the total ROI.

Working as a Lead Business Analyst, the Digital Transformation Steering Committee has asked you to perform the following analysis and report back to the steering committee in two weeks.

The Steering Committee consists of senior leadership $($VP and above$)$ from IT and business.

The Steering Committee asks:

$$ Define the problem statement

$$ Identify stakeholders for the AI project

$$ Pros and Cons of AI vs$.$ manual control

$$ List the critical decision points

$$ Potential IT and Business Benefits

$$ ROI calculation