How Artificial Intelligence can help your business?

With so much buzz surrounding AI and so many companies implementing it, you might feel like Artificial Intelligence might be the answer to all your problems. Helping customers with simple tasks or questions without taking your employees’ time? Keeping an eye on your inventory and alerting you whenever you are short on resources? Making sure all your machines and equipment run smoothly? Predicting various business patterns such as how much of a given resource you will need next month, based on the production data?

How ArtificialIintelligence will change the future

AI machines can do all of those tasks and far more. And as the algorithms AI technologies are based on are getting “smarter” over time, they keep getting even better at what they can do. On top of that, AI tools can work around the clock without ever needing a break or getting bored – unlike us humans. Of course, that doesn’t mean that AI is here to replace human employees – we are very far from that sci-fi scenario. Quite the opposite – with the help of AI, your employees can have more time, energy, and motivation to focus on more complicated tasks or those requiring creative thinking.

But what exactly can AI bring to your business? Let’s find out.  

What are benefits of Artificial Intelligence

When it comes to complex or creative tasks or those requiring a great dose of empathy, humans are winning by a landslide. But for simple, repetitive activities or those requiring being active in real-time? AI is winning here. No matter how long they have to perform a given task, they will keep doing it in exactly the same manner, without getting tired or distracted. That means you can rely on AI-powered machines to finish all the tasks you need time on time and without errors, notify you about anything unusual happening straight away or being available for your customers even during the weekend or holidays. 

Efficiency and AI

But where AI can really shine is in analyzing and comparing big data. If your team had to gather data about your sales or production from the last year and then compare it with the present data, how much time would it take them? And would they even be able to do it? AI-powered tools will meanwhile need only a couple of minutes at most to gather the data from all available sources, analyze and organize it and then present everything to you. You can even choose which metrics AI should focus on and which should be ignored to give you precisely the reports you need for your business.

Ways artificial intelligence can save time, energy, and money

With that incredible efficiency of AI machines also come visible saving of time and money for your business. Artificial intelligence technologies allow companies to automate various repetitive processes, freeing up their employees’ time, which they can later use on more complicated tasks, thus improving productivity.

But AI can also help you make an informed decision about what you should do next and alert you to any issues before they become a threat. For example, let’s say you installed an Artificial Intelligence system to monitor the state of all your manufacturing machine in real-time. The system works 24/7, and once it notices there’s (even a slight) change in how the machine operates, it immediately sends a warning to you and your maintenance team that there might be a problem with the device. It might be something small and not needing attention at the moment – but it might also be an early sign that a machine part is about to break down.

If you could notice all machine and equipment-related problems and fix those before they cause any significant damage, that would drastically reduce the costs of unexpected downtime caused by a faulty machine. Even better is that Artificial intelligence systems armed with Predictive Maintenance features can extend the life of your devices – based on data from McKinsey’s research, using predictive maintenance tools can reduce downtime by 30 to 50% and increase machine life by 20 to 40%.

AI technology gives invaluable business insights

As a business owner, you want to make sure that your employees are as productive as possible, that your sales or production metrics are as expected and that you are ahead of the competition. For this, you need data – but if you can’t exactly make any sense out of it, then it’s virtually useless. With AI, you can gather and analyze all sales, marketing, or production performance metrics to understand what is working for your business and what you should improve. Artificial intelligence AI tools can, for example, record every contact your sales reps had with prospects and then use the real-time data to identify what the representatives are doing right and where they are failing – so you can tailor their employee training to those specific parts where they need more help.

Or how about knowing what exactly your competitors are doing? Using Competitive intelligence tools, you can track virtually everything related to your rivals – from their online tactics to the newest promotions, to find out what is working for other businesses in your industry. In fact, AI can even give you a glimpse into the future – without a crystal ball being needed. 

Thanks to Predictive analytics and machine learning, artificial intelligence AI systems can analyze and compare past and present data to make predictions about future events and answer many of your questions. What resources and how many will you need next month? What is the forecasted sales revenue for next quarter? How likely is the new product to sell well? The questions you can ask AI are infinite – and based on the data it possesses, AI can answer them all, though, of course, you shouldn’t treat them as foolproof.

AI can help to enhance customer experience

Modern customers are (mostly) fine with giving their personal data away if it means they will get a better and smoother service. That’s why Netflix can show its users series and movies that they might like based on what the users watched earlier. In the same way, Amazon gives us product recommendations, Spotify creates personalized playlists, and Facebook shows ads of products we might like.

All that is possible because we leave a lot of data online – where we live, what job we have, where we are at a given time of day, what and where we buy, what we watch, what services we use, and so on. But for a single employee or even a team of employees, it’s simply impossible to gather all the data, analyze it, and then use it to think of ways how they could make their customers happier. For AI, though, that’s not the slightest problem – it can prepare a list of product or service recommendations tailored to each customer straight away and immediately show the list to them. The main goal here is to help customers find the products they might need precisely when they might need them to boost customers’ experience and trust. 

AI technology helps with customer support

Today, people want fast, easy, and personalized customer service anytime and anywhere. If they don’t get it, they have so many brands and products to choose from that they can switch brands at any time they wish. Many companies are struggling with stopping their customers from leaving though – quite often because they don’t know which customers are most likely to abandon the brand and why. AI can lend a hand here as well and in two ways. One, AI can provide the customer support reps with all the knowledge and data they need to give an exceptional, personalized support to each and every customer reaching out to the support. 

With AI – your business, business processes, powered chatbots, your customer support can also work during the weekends or holidays – even if your human support is away, the chatbot will help your customers find the right information for their question or issue or allow them to leave a message for the support team.  

Machine learning reduces errors

It’s not like artificial intelligence doesn’t make any mistakes – there must be someone who will keep an eye on the AI devices and systems to make sure they won’t go out of control. But because it doesn’t get bored or distracted, it also makes far fewer errors when it comes to repetitive tasks than humans. You can ask the AI to run a specific action for as long as you need and get consistent results each time – because AI will only focus on the guidelines it got and the data it possesses. That way, the quality of your product or service can get a significant boost as the AI will make sure that nothing slips through the cracks.

The problem here, though might be that you need to regularly check the data given to AI to make sure it is up-to-date and free of errors. Since AI is so reliant on the data inside its database, it might give incorrect suggestions or complete tasks in the wrong way if the data it has is messy.

AI can help to strengthen your cybersecurity

So we know that AI can take simple but time-consuming tasks out of your employees’ shoulders, organize millions of data points into clear graphs and make your customers far happier thanks to personalized recommendations. But did you know you can also ask AI to protect your company and business from various threats? For example, many financial and credit card companies (just to mention Visa) are using AI to distinguish fraud transactions from genuine ones to fight the ever-increasing numbers of illegal transactions. 

And that’s only one use of how AI might aid you in defending your business – it can track down and stop a wide variety of threats, from malware and phishing attacks to “missing” inventory. By using sophisticated algorithms that keep learning over time and monitoring the network or physical area 24/7, AI can detect all forms of suspicious behavior (whether it’s an unrecognized email with an attachment or someone unauthorized trying to enter the office) and immediately react – for example, by calling the security.    

Conclusion

The benefits of AI we mentioned might be pretty general, but that’s because each company can use AI differently and gain something else from it. But some benefits are the same for every industry – artificial intelligence can improve customer experience thanks to chatbots and personalized recommendations, increase revenue by pointing out sales opportunities and keep an eye on your machines. It can also monitor your supplies, predict customer behavior, alert you to any unusual or suspicious events happening – the list can go on. So it’s not only about what general benefits of AI can bring – it’s about finding the value it can bring to your organization. AI can help businesses to grow and develop. Find out what benefits can bring AI to your business. Let’s talk.