Artificial intelligence is without a doubt the most transformative technology that we have access to. It has use cases across pretty much every industry, whether it’s boosting your supply chain and driving new efficiencies there or whether you’re using it to better market to potential customers.
In fact, AI can improve your business in so many different ways that it’s rapidly becoming a must-have for businesses across the globe. At this point, if you’re not regularly using AI tools, you risk being left behind. Here’s why.
5 ways AI helps for business
1. Better marketing
One of the most obvious ways that AI can help businesses is when it’s applied to their marketing efforts. AI is what powers the super targeted recommendations that we see on Netflix, and there’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing when we make content recommendations and even product recommendations on ecommerce sites.
AI is at its best when it’s powering personalisation, and so it’s a good idea to integrate an AI-powered customer relationship management system so that you can monitor the actions that people are taking on your website.
Once you know this, you can start to build AI-based marketing tools into your marketing approach by default. The best way to do this is usually with an AI-based CRM system, but there are other ways to approach it too. The important thing is to make use of AI in a way that allows you to provide personalised, more targeted messaging.
2. Better supply chain
AI can also help to drive efficiencies by helping to streamline your supply chain. It’ll be able to pick up where you’re overstocking or when you’re losing orders because of a delay in parts arriving, and it can then flag these issues up so that they can be reviewed and acted upon by humans.
One of the big advantages of artificial intelligence is that it can process huge amounts of data that no human being could ever hope to stay on top of. When it comes to your supply chain, there are typically too many moving parts for humans to comprehend, and that’s where AI comes in.
As usual, AI is at its best when it’s being used in conjunction with human oversight.
The best combination is to mix humans and machines together, and that’s where AI supply chain software comes in. You give it the data, it gives you recommendations, and then you choose whether to act upon it.
3. Better recruitment
Coming back to the idea of AI being great at personalisation, that means it has a lot to offer when it comes to staffing and recruitment, especially with larger companies that have bigger employee bases.
AI based tools can help you to provide better training and career development, reducing the need for recruitment by helping you to keep people at your company for longer. Even when you do need to recruit, AI-based tools can help you to recruit internally.
If you have to look externally, AI can power smarter LinkedIn advertisements to help you to reach the best possible candidates. It also works under the bonnet of many recruitment sites and portals to help to match companies up with talent.
4. Better customer service
AI can boost your customer service by helping you to prioritise which customers need a response most immediately so that you’re witnessing the greatest returns without missing anyone out or losing customers because you’re too busy answering sales enquiries to help them to solve their problems.
But arguably the best use of AI for your customer service team is for you to create an AI-based chatbot that can sit on your website and respond to people’s questions in real-time. Most companies don’t have the budget to respond to questions around the clock, but an AI sales assistant on a website can make the task a whole heap easier.
5. Better R&D
And let’s not forget the potential that AI has to revolutionise your research and development! If this sounds a little far-fetched, perhaps you need to take a look at the healthcare industry, which is already turning to AI to power drug discovery and to shorten the length and costs of clinical trials.
But there are other ways to put AI to use for research and development. If your company makes soup, for example, then you could use AI tools to analyse the chatter on social networking sites and to discover which flavours are the most popular or that are the most underserved by current product offerings.
Of course, remember that all of this research and development will only get you so far, which brings us back to the topic of humans and machines working in partnership. The insights that AI provides are great, but only if you and your team take those insights and use them to improve your performance.
Conclusion
Now that you know just five of the main ways that AI can improve your business, it’s time for you to start making AI an everyday part of your workflows. You don’t need to be a computer programmer to reap the rewards that AI has to offer, and indeed it’s often already built into the tools that people are using.
So now it’s over to you. Have you made AI a part of your business? If so, what have the results been like? Be sure to let us know what you think with a comment!
