Artificial Intelligence (AI) may sound like something straight out of a science fiction movie, but many businesses, large and small, are using it to help their businesses grow. From data science to customer service, any business can benefit from AI.
Benefits of AI in Business
Before deciding if AI is right for your business, you should understand the advantages of implementing it.
Increased Employee Productivity
AI can help improve employee productivity by automating manual, routine tasks. These are typically the tasks such as data entry your employees won’t miss. Limiting their involvement in these activities and allowing them to focus on their overall goals can help keep your employees happier while helping them save time so they can focus on more important tasks.
Improved Marketing Efforts
AI can help you gather and understand your business’ data better to make the right decisions when it comes to your marketing. For example, you could leverage data from your website and have it put in a monthly report so you can easily see which marketing efforts are increasing your revenue and providing you with a higher return on investment.
Not only that, but it can also help you visualize which efforts are causing you to waste money. Having separate data spanning many reports can be confusing and make it difficult for you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Time & Money Savings
If you want your business to save money, you have to save yourself and your employees time. More productive employees mean more money savings for your business because they’ll be able to accomplish more. As you continue to replace manual systems with automated software, your employees can focus on larger business goals and get more work done in a day.
Better Business Performance
AI offers your business insights on clients that can help you predict their needs to communicate with them better and prepare for the future. It also allows you to deliver personalized solutions to meet the needs of different types of customers to effectively engage with them.
Implementing AI
AI is a popular topic in all industries. With chatbots answering customer service inquiries and the tools you already use, such as Salesforce, integrating with AI, now is an important time to discuss how you can incorporate it into your business. Practical applications of AI are simple and can help improve your business using business intelligence insights, driving customer engagement, and automating tasks. Here’s how you can successfully incorporate AI into your business.
Learn About AI
AI can help all types of businesses in many different ways. For example, a marketing agency might use AI to predict customer behavior, while a crypto exchange platform might use it to predict an investor’s return on investment or display crypto prices before they invest.
Before you decide to implement AI into your business, take the time to understand everything that it can do for your business and in what ways. Learning about AI doesn’t require you to hire a company to research different products for you; instead, you can do a quick search online to learn how businesses are already using AI to improve business performance. You can also sign up for a remote workshop or course to help you learn what AI can do and how you can start implementing it.
Identify Your Business’ Problems
Before you can start researching the different types of AI applications that can help your business grow, you should identify the problems you want AI to help you solve. Then, consider the technology you currently use and think about the ways AI can improve your efforts to help you further increase automation or make standard, time-consuming processes more efficient. For example, if you have an influx of customer service inquiries and all of those questions are similar, you can use a chatbot on your website to answer those questions without the need for a customer service team to constantly answer the same questions every day.
Prioritize Value
After you’ve identified the areas of your business you think AI can help with, you need to start thinking about the value of AI. Entrepreneurs need to be careful not to get distracted by all of the fancy bells and whistles of AI. If an application doesn’t add value to your business, you don’t need it.
To prioritize the value of AI implementation, you can start by looking at the financial value. For example, suppose you’re using AI to improve your business intelligence data for digital marketing purposes. In that case, you can identify how the automated data can help you save money. In this example, you might save money by being able to identify bottlenecks in your business operations, issues within the sales team, and even pages on your website that aren’t performing.
Bring in Experts
Whether you run an online business or a B2B company, you should always get advice from experts. Once your business understands what’s involved in the implementation, you can start thinking about integration. If you’ve never used AI before, start small and keep your goals in mind.
Bringing in an expert can help you learn more about how AI will work in your business. They can also help you run a pilot program to determine if AI is something you should commit to.
Organize Employees
Incorporating AI into your business not only affects your bottom line but can have a positive impact on your employees. For example, AI that promotes automation can help your employees save time on manual tasks, making them happier and more productive, which can help you improve your employee retention.
Since your employees will be impacted the most by AI integration, they should be involved in the process. You can form a task force to help you integrate the new programs into your business and keep your data clean.
Final Thoughts
AI offers businesses many opportunities to help them succeed by saving time, money, and resources. Additionally, it can help attract top talent by showing your business thinks about the future and uses technology to make their jobs more engaging.
