How to scale your SME business with AI
If you run a small or medium sized company, chances are you are already scaling your business with AI.?Most of us use AI powered tools in our everyday work life, without even knowing it. Features like chatbots, email spam filters, voice-to-text/speech recognition, social media analytics just to name a few, use artificial intelligence to help you save time and solve business problems.?Problem solving is in fact one of the main reasons why businesses adopt artificial intelligence powered solutions. You might think that starting an AI project in your small company is an impossible and very expensive goal to achieve. The truth is, that most likely you already have a lot of the resources needed to do so, without having to spend a fortune. But before we delve into the roadmap that we have put together to show you how you can scale your small/ medium business with AI, you need to understand what AI can do for your business. In order to help you do so, we have to go back to the very basic?definition of artificial intelligence?and understand how AI works.?
What is artificial intelligence and what can AI do for your business?
Artificial intelligence is “the study and development of computer systems that can copy intelligent human behaviour” (Oxford Dictionary).?When it comes to the question of how your business can benefit from AI, there is no one single answer. Its most popular applications help increase employees’ productivity through the automation of tasks like scheduling or reporting, for example. Think about social media marketing. All social media platforms provide your marketing manager with detailed analytics about your campaigns. This means your marketing department doesn’t have to spend hours collecting all the data and organising it in different shapes and forms, because an AI application does the job for them. They can now use this extra time to plan and execute the next campaign. Now, imagine you could provide all your business departments with tools which could help your employees speed up certain tasks. That would increase your business’ productivity, which would soon result in an increased ROI for your company. Wouldn’t that be great??This is just an example, and there is much more AI can do to help you scale your business.?From increasing customer engagement, to improving quality controls and reducing costs, there are many different ways your business can profit from AI. It really depends on what your priorities and your most pressing issues are.
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How does artificial intelligence work?
In order to empower a machine to mimic human intelligence you need to feed it data. The more accurate your data is, the more accurate the output of the machine will be. Once the machine is provided with data, you need to make sure that the final output will match your requirements by training the machine on what parameters it has to use to analyse and sort your data. This process it’s called?machine learning.?This might still sound very technical and complex, but in reality it is easier than you think. There is no such thing as one size fits all and eventually, it all comes down to your business’ goals and the way you approach and pursue them. You probably think your company is too small and your budget is too tight for you to start an in house AI project, but by the end of this article you will have found out that you might already have in place everything you need to do so.
A roadmap to designing a simple and affordable in house AI tool.?
Start simple.?We identified 5 simple steps you can take to start your in house AI project, and it all boils down to identifying your existing resources.