How AI Is Changing the Way Businesses Operate

What once might have seemed like a far-off futuristic concept is now here, with us, in the real world. While the technology is still very much finding its feet, with plenty of room for growth, there are already quite a lot of practical applications for AI for businesses, including smaller businesses. Here, we’re going to look at a host of the applications already being used, as well as some spaces to keep an eye on for the future.

Personalized Customer Experiences

AI has come hand-in-hand with the increased collection of user and customer data, collected and collated by businesses to better help them understand how their target audience interacts with their brand. AI is being used alongside this data, gathered from customer interactions, purchase histories, and browsing behaviors to create personalized customer experiences. This includes tailor recommendations of products for them in e-commerce stores, personalized marketing campaigns designed to hit the interests and pain points of individual customers, and even time-based offers based on customer preferences, encouraging them to buy while the price is good. It’s not just for e-commerce either. Digital media companies like Netflix and YouTube use algorithms to suggest content to keep customers hooked for longer, as well.

Automating Routine Tasks

AI can affect how your business works on every level. Even those in the trenches, doing the daily admin and tasks to help it run smoothly can benefit from it. In fact, one of the biggest transformations that it might offer in the business is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. Automating software has had a part in digital technology for a while, already, but now AI is able to help it focus on more complex responsibilities, such as data entry and processing, invoice management, as well as scheduling, and appointment setting. This can free up your workers to do the labor that demands their most specialized skills, improve efficiency, and cut costs.

Powering Chatbots

Customer services are a vital aspect of any modern business, and it’s also one of the arenas in which AI is able to show its most impressive work. Modern AI now allows you to build a chatbot software that is able to provide customized and nuanced answers to frequently asked questions, help customers make better purchasing decisions, and help solve basic issues without the need for human intervention. It’s always a good idea to make sure that there is a human person available at some point in the customer support process to back up your AI, but the natural language processing technology at the heart of these chatbots is becoming more sophisticated and harder to separate from human speech as time goes on.

AI in Search Marketing

Aside from helping you customize things like customer emails and product recommendations on your website, AI is also likely to play a bigger role in the world of search marketing, as well. Alongside voice search, it has been one of the biggest changes in the search engine landscape as of late. Search engines are increasingly using AI to generate rich snippets at the top of their results pages, and optimizing your site to include the keywords most likely to appear in these rich snippets and predicting customer intent based on their search patterns can help you take advantage of this technology, giving you a leg up in the race for the top spot that your competitors might not have identified, yet.

Predictive Analytics

As mentioned, AI and data gathering have been working hand in hand, since they’ve become mainstream business technologies at roughly the same time. Data analytics is playing an increasingly large role in helping business owners and stakeholders make better-informed decisions, and now, AI is able to do a lot of the data collating and decision-making for them. AI is being used to identify emerging market opportunities for businesses to potentially expand into. Using existing customer data, it can spot trends in changing customer needs, allowing businesses to evolve their products and service offerings. On a more day-to-day level, it can even help improve inventory management by highlighting which goods are likely to need to be replaced or to increase their stock in response to potential demand.

Enhanced Cyber Security

The modern era has seen the rise of a plethora of new threats, from ransomware to an increase in more sophisticated social engineering hacks. AI is starting to play a role in enhancing cybersecurity to prevent businesses from being affected by these threats. AI is being used to, for instance, detect unusual network activity in real-time, providing a more responsive threat response. They can also help identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited, giving businesses the opportunity to patch up their security holes. They can even respond to threats with automated solutions, such as cutting network access to sensitive data if there is any indication of a brief.

Changing How We Recruit

Despite the fact that AI is becoming increasingly impressive and practical across a whole range of applications, you’re still going to need a skilled and reliable team to do the most important work for the business. However, AI can even change how you do that, being used increasingly in recruitment processes to help businesses find the right talent. AI recruitment tools are able to perform tasks like screening resumes and shortlisting candidates. They can even conduct the initial assessments of candidates using chatbots. The use of AI can help to reduce unconscious bias in hiring decisions, ensuring that you’re working with those who truly are the best for the position, but you should give them some level of human oversight to make sure that no unwanted hiring irregularities start appearing.

Dynamic Pricing Strategies

Although they are something of a controversial topic at the moment, dynamic pricing strategies are likely to become the norm for online businesses if they are not regulated out of existence. As the name implies, these are pricing strategies that see the costs of goods change depending on demand and opportunities, and AI is being used to run them. For instance, if there’s a high demand for a certain item based on overall user data, then it can increase prices, making you more likely to profit more for each sale. On the other hand, if there’s new competition in the same product type, it can reduce prices to help you draw sales away from those competitors.

Supply Chain Optimization

Any business that relies on the sale of physical goods is going to need to have a strong and reliable supply chain. Aside from working with the right providers and suppliers, you can also use AI-driven supply chain management to improve the efficiency of your logistics, which can also help to reduce your costs. As mentioned before, AI can be used to help you predict demand fluctuations, which can also change how much you order from your supplier, ensuring that you don’t end up with more products than you need. For drivers, AI can also help to optimize delivery routes, helping them make more stops on their trips, and avoiding unnecessary fuel waste on the road.

Customer Relationship Management

Another important arm of customer support, as well as effective sales, in the modern business landscape, CRM software helps you develop a better understanding of your customers so you can improve every interaction you have with them. They allow you to save individual customer profiles so that you can ensure more consistent communications with them across different touchpoints, and can help your sales team better plan when to reach out to encourage them further into the marketing funnel. AI-driven CRM software is able to improve the process even further, analyzing customer interactions to better predict their behavior, automating follow-up communication with them, and even recommending retention strategies when you might be about to lose those customers to churn.

Improved Financial Management

While it’s always important to make sure that you have a human pair of eyes on the finances to avoid any problems, Ai is able to simplify financial management in a host of ways. Some of the simplest benefits include things like automating tasks, such as expense tracking, reporting, and forecasting your revenue and cash flow. However, AI is also able to provide more sophisticated financial advice, such as identifying spending holes in your budget and recommending cost-saving opportunities as a result. Businesses are able to use AI-powered accounting software to manage their finances much more efficiently, which can allow them to focus on other parts of running the business, instead, such as attaining strategic growth.

It’s hard to say what the eventual impact of AI will be on the future of business. It may be a flash in the pan, it may continue to play a limited but important role in modern businesses, or it may be an enduring change that continues to evolve, much like digital technology’s place in business. What’s certain, however, is that there are already ways AI can change the way you run your business.