Florin Stefan, Stefanini: “AI combined with machine learning is where we put a lot of focus”

“We were dealing with digital transformation topics for the last at least 10 years and AI comes actually to accelerate the digital transformation inside companies, in our companies as well and also in the customers’ organizations.

I would say that ESG plays a significant role nowadays, especially on the regulatory aspect and compliance, but all of this cannot be possible without data. So, data in analytics I would say that is the backbone of the transformation of organizations and we are applying this by looking not only at the external customer but also for the internal customer as well. Because our employees are our customers to some extent, and we identified actually two pathways about applying AI in our context.

And one is more focused on the external customer, and it has to do with building AI products, of course leveraging existing data or models. Gen AI is playing a significant role, but I would not focus only on generative AI because AI is a broader topic than generative,” Florin Stefan, Application Development Director at Stefanini EMEA said at Romanian Business Services Forum organized by Outsourcing Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“AI combined with machine learning is where we put a lot of focus and being in the IT services industry, I would say that Stefanini started this journey a while ago. So, we somehow cheated a bit because we started more than 10 years ago investing into our own products on top of machine learning. At that time, generative AI wasn’t there. It was not a prospect to validate in our context, in our business context. This is one pathway that we are investing in.

We are pushing a lot of effort nowadays in building our own AI products on top of existing solutions in the market. And another pathway forward is actually how can we apply AI to augment our internal processes? Our context is very interesting because IT has been actually one of the initial adapters for the new technologies. Either by building those new technologies or by using the technologies available in the market. Using tools like Copilot, for example, for application development. Using tools like generative AI and automatic translation for customer support.

This is kind of the direction that we are using today in order to augment all our delivery processes. But I’m not only referring to delivery per se, but also to support functions, for example. We are investing time and effort in building solutions or augmenting our processes around HR, for example. Finance, legal, and so on.

So, two directions for Stefani in the future: using AI to build products on top of technology and using AI to augment the internal processes in order to drive performance, better quality, time-to-market and so on.”