How SMBs can Benefit from Gen-AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses of all sizes. With recent advances in generative AI (Gen-AI), Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) now have access to some really powerful yet affordable new tools.

Small and medium-sized businesses can greatly benefit from using Gen-AI. This technology can enhance operations by automating tasks such as creating marketing content and empowering employees with valuable knowledge and insights. Additionally, it can contribute to business growth by enabling better customer support through personalized chatbots and improving email communication.

While challenges such as data privacy and security should be addressed, early adoption of Gen-AI offers SMBs a competitive edge and the potential for greater efficiency, innovation, and business growth.

If you want to quickly refresh your understanding of Generative AI, here is a 60 second primer by Bernard Marr

Key Benefits

Gen-AI offers SMBs a wide range of benefits, which include but are not limited to:

• Improved efficiency and flexibility: With Gen-AI, businesses can speed and even automate tasks that previously required significant human intervention, resulting in cost reduction and improved outcomes. It can also facilitate faster and more accurate decision-making by automating data analysis and predicting trends.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction: Gen-AI elevates overall customer satisfaction levels with the creation of personalized customer experiences, such as tailor-made content and precise chatbots that provide 24/7 customer support.
• Promotion of business growth and revenue: Gen-AI plays a crucial role in generating new ideas, developing innovative products and services, and improved customer satisfaction which all lead to business growth, customer retention, and increased revenue.

Key Use Cases

There are many use cases that are being developed and experimented with, but the following are clear winners because of their low cost and great fit.

• Content Creation: Generating high-quality content is a time-consuming process that requires significant resources. Many SMBs just don’t have the resources needed and are not able to keep up with the need to update their websites and social media channels.With free Gen-AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard and Bing AI, SMBs can speedup content creation, including everything from blog posts and social media updates to product descriptions and marketing materials.Gen-AI tools such as Midjourney, Bing AI Image Creator and even Canva’s AI capabilities make creating customized images a breeze.Videos for promotions and training has become possible without spending a lot of money and efforts with tools such as Synthesia, Speechify and DeepBrainAI.
• Customer Experience and Service: Gen-AI can lead to better customer experience, improved customer satisfaction, and increased retention byUsing customer data and preferences to create personalized customer experiences including recommending products or services that are relevant to the customer's needs, and providing proactive customer support.Powering personalized chatbots and email responses, to provide round-the-clock assistance to customers, addressing their inquiries and issues promptly and scaling to high volumes automatically.Analyzing customer data and generating insights, Gen-AI can help SMBs to identify common issues and pain points and also recommend solutions.
• Employee Productivity: Several tools and platforms employees use today as well as niche products have the potential to boost employee productivity tremendouslyMany leading tools and platforms such as Microsoft office, Google workspace suite, Salesforce CRM are infusing Gen-AI powered co-pilots that make working with them fast, efficient and overall a great experience. Code development assistance like Github Co-Pilot, ?Google Codey and Amazon CodeWhispererare a special use case for software developers, potentially lowering the bar for development and improving speed of delivery. This trend will continue to get deeper and smarter and expand to all software providers.Gen-AI can access all the internal databases, knowledge base and documentation to provide accurate and concise answers to day-to-day questions from employees across all functions. It can also proactively identify problems, provide insights and recommend solutions.

Key Challenges

Key challenges that businesses face in implementing Gen-AI solutions, especially for the advanced uses beyond content creation will include:

• Implementation and Runtime Costs: Creating and fine-tuning Gen-AI solutions needs expertize that may not be available within the company and may need investments with outside providers. Also there can be substantial costs for running licensed models such as ChatGPT - 3 / 4 from OpenAI and hosting cost for open source models such as LLaMa from Meta.
• Finding and Retaining AI experts: The demand for AI expertize is high and the talent pool is limited. This can make it difficult for businesses to find and retain the skills they need to implement and manage Gen-AI solutions.
• Data Privacy and Cybersecurity: If not careful, large amounts of proprietary and sensitive data can be exposed through Gen-AI and these models are vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Recommendations

When implementing Gen-AI for SMBs, it's essential to start small, have clear goals, understand the specific needs of the business. Make sure you consider data privacy and security, assess the cost-effectiveness of AI solutions you are considering. And finally ensure that you have the necessary infrastructure and expertise in place to support, if you cannot do it by yourself.

• Start Small: Choose a specific problem or opportunity that you want to address with Gen-AI. Gain confidence by getting business results before diversifying.
• Focus on Data Privacy and Security: Take steps to ensure security and privacy of your customer and proprietary data and mitigate cybersecurity risks by securing storage and transmission through encryption.
• Measure your Results: Once you have implemented a Gen-AI solution, track your results to see how it is impacting your business. This will help you to identify areas where you can improve and to justify further investment.
• Partner with Experts: Advanced application of Gen-AI such as creating chatbots may need expertize that you and your team may not have. There are a number of providers that offer Gen-AI solutions and services, including Digitech Consulting. Partnering with an expert can help you to avoid common pitfalls and get the most out of your investment.

Conclusion

Gen-AI has the potential to revolutionize the way that SMBs do business. By automating content creation, improving customer service and experience, improving employee productivity and generating insights, SMBs can gain a significant competitive advantage, business growth and profitability. If you're an SMB looking to stay ahead of the curve, now is the time to start exploring the possibilities of Gen-AI. Those who fail to seize the Gen-AI opportunity will be left behind.

Originally published on digitech consulting website blog: