Published on August 20th, 2018 | by Evan Morris

How Business Can Reap the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence

It wasn’t that long ago that artificial intelligence seemed like a science-fiction concept that would never become reality. Today, while we may not have computers controlling everything, we do have AI that is capable of doing many different things for us. These advanced algorithms can even learn and adjust their programming to better perform their functions. In recent years, AI technology has advanced in a number of ways and is much more prevalent in businesses than ever before. As a business owner, there are a number of ways you can take advantage of everything AI has to offer. Here are a few of the benefits your business can reap by implementing artificial intelligence.

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AI Automates Processes, Completing Them Faster

One of the biggest benefits your business can get from AI is a boost in speed. AI can automate processes that take employees hours to complete. For example, AI can analyze data at a very fast speed, comparing various pieces of information to each other or pulling out customer records that match specific queries. You can use AI to create lists of potential leads, continually watch for changes in certain fields, and much more. Many tasks that don’t require creative thinking or advanced decision making can be automated via AI.

AI can also scale with your data. Smaller businesses may not have that much information to sort through, but as the company grows, so will the amount of data it collects. An automation AI won’t look at the quantity of information—it simply continues looking at each customer record or other set of data one at a time until it’s done.

Taking Advantage of AI

But automation is just one benefit of AI. There are a number of ways you can take advantage of its speed and its attention to detail.

Intelligent analysis, for example, goes hand in hand with managing large amounts of data. The more data you can give your AI, the more patterns it can analyze. Once it has determined patterns in customer behavior, your AI will be able to predict what customers may do in the future, allowing you to tailor your marketing and other processes to these behaviors. It can also look at real-time data and make suggestions. For example, if the AI registers a delay in shipments, it can suggest adjustments to delivery time, predict how this delay will affect orders and profits, and even suggest solutions.

AI also offers intelligent interaction. You may have dozens or hundreds of different apps and programs that your business relies on to operate. AI can help manage all of these apps, creating personalized dashboards featuring the apps you regularly use or that the AI believes you will need. This intelligent interaction will make tasks faster for employees by helping them focus more on their tasks and less on the software they’re using.

Finally, intelligent automation can make some tasks completely automatic. These systems will be able to learn as they go, taking on more and more of the basic tasks involved in running your business. Employees will be able to focus on working directly with customers and on creative solutions to more complicated problems instead of handling menial tasks.

Using AI to Generate Insights

The data you’ve gathered can analyzed via AI can be used to generate a number of different insights. This data does need to be structured, however—that means it should be in a standard format that is the same across all sets of data. Customer data, for example, should include the same information for each customer. Once this data has been structured, it can be compared and analyzed. Your AI will be able to make use of it in some way and provide information for you to use in product design, marketing, and other customer relations.

Improve Customer Engagement

Another benefit you can reap from using AI is improved customer engagement. AI can run chatbots on your website that gather basic information from customers. Some of these chatbots can even solve basic customer problems or alert the property customer service employee that a customer needs assistance. These AI can understand natural language and even respond like a human. Some have even fooled people into believing they’re interacting with a person rather than an AI.

Another way of utilizing AI in customer engagement is to make use of a Voice AI powered customer service system. Customers can actually talk to these AI rather than typing out their questions or issues. The AI has been trained to understand and adapt to various things such as slang, accents, and non-standard spoken language. This means that it’s highly capable of understanding what the customer needs. A crude form of this type of AI has existed on phone helplines for a number of years. However, as many customers may have discovered, it wasn’t always able to understand exactly what was being said. Today’s AI are much more responsive and helpful, removing a lot of the frustration that came with those early systems.

AI Can Reduce Cost and Make You More Competitive

While AI does have some costs, most see a major return on investment over a period of just a few years. Implementing AI can disrupt your business for a period of time. Employees may need to be reassigned or take on different duties, everyone will need to be trained on how the AI operates, and even your customers may see some changes. In the long run, however, you’ll notice that you actually save money by automating processes using AI.

It may also help you work more quickly than your competitors, giving you a major advantage over them. As highlighted above, the insight AI can give you through data analysis can help you create better products and market them in a smarter, more effective way. That can give you the edge you need to overtake similar companies. AI may also help you see new opportunities to grow and expand.

With these various advantages and benefits, it’s no wonder more and more businesses are taking advantage of all that AI has to offer. If you don’t want to fall behind, it’s a good idea to start investigating how AI can help you.

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, benefits, business, reap

About the Author

Evan Morris Known for his boundless energy and enthusiasm, Evan works as a Freelance Networking Analyst, an avid blog writer, particularly around technology, cybersecurity and forthcoming threats which can compromise sensitive data. With a vast experience of ethical hacking, Evan’s been able to express his views articulately.