Artificial Intelligence: A smart way to make business more efficient.

The general understanding about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that it is something related to Big and Fancy corporations and it is nothing to do with small and mid-sized enterprises.

This article is written for those entrepreneurs who has above mentioned understanding and doesn’t bother even to know about AI.

Today, Artificial Intelligence is a very popular subject that is widely discussed in the technology and business circles. With the advancement in technology, we are already connected to AI in one way or the other – whether it is Siri, Pandora, Netflix, Watson or Alexa. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems that emphasizes the development of intelligence machines, thinking and working like humans. For example, speech recognition, problem-solving, learning and planning. Some subsets of AI include machine learning, big data and natural language processing also.

It is predominantly large organizations that have profited from new-age technologies like AI and Machine learning. Whereas Artificial Intelligence isn’t just for companies with billion-dollar budgets. This is because of general perception that AI requires huge investment. In fact, AI-powered applications help small business / innovative SMEs to significantly cut the costs and deliver excellent customer experiences.

If we wish to design our own AI, it is time-consuming process and requires a considerable amount of investment. But, fortunately, several tech companies have open-sourced their AI efforts to make AI reach more and more consumers. Leveraging this platform for your business saves you considerable cost and time.

By launching on a smaller scale and leveraging ready-made solutions, one can efficiently get the capabilities of AI and improve performance of business considerably.

In my opinion following AI tools can give good business benefit to small businesses.

Use of AI in Business Analytics: The most crucial and essential use case of AI for small or even big corporates is in analytics. AI has opened new horizons in the domain of analytics; by leveraging predictive analysis, one can scale up their enterprise in a tremendous way.

If you are trying to implement AI for your business without wanting to invest heavily in machine learning, then analytics is the way to go.

Use of AI for Prompt and Excellent Customer Service:  Unlike big companies who can afford to maintain 24-hour customer service lines, small businesses can't pay operators to answer calls or emails whenever they come in. AI-powered Chatbots provide assistance to customers whenever they need it and immediately answer questions from FAQ.

This way small businesses can deploy AI to simultaneously improve customer experiences and generate new business.

Use of AI to drive Marketing platform: While for small businesses, Marketing is always an unaffordable mission. They now can reach a vast audience online. They can use AI-based advertising platforms developed by companies like Facebook and Google to target specific consumers. They can collect and analyse consumer data from multiple channels. And they can do all of this without a team of marketing people. Therefore Small businesses should start integrating AI now if they want to reach as many consumers as possible in the future.

Use AI to expand Sales team with a chatbot: For those entrepreneurs, who don’t have a dedicated sales team, there are plenty of tools available who works for you as Sales representative. For instance, a popular sales tool is chatbots, those pop-up windows that appear when customer first land on your webpage.

If you have a website, it’s a great idea to incorporate a chatbot. It’s like having an employee working 24/7. It’s also a communication platform many companies prefer, your customers get immediate responses.

You can also track your customer’s journey as they navigate through your website and analyse their behaviour using AI tools. These valuable insights can help you create a more personalized experience for the customer.

Smarter Email marketing: AI has been a playing a significant role in marketing. Have you ever received an email from a business/eCommerse website with a subject line that reads something to the effect of “Come back, we miss you” suggesting that you haven’t visited their store / site for long time. If so, this is artificial intelligence, and it’s actively working in the background.

You can also further look for an automation. Email automation allows you to create emails that automatically send when triggered by a customer’s activity, inactivity, or a specific date like an anniversary. The triggers are essentially AI at work in the background. If a customer takes a certain action, a programmed (or machine-learned) response is triggered, and the customer (hopefully) converts to a sale.

There are many more usages of AI in business, one need to explore.