On the Edge of Technology: An Ultimate Guide to Using AI in Your Business
Today, AI technologies like ChatGPT or Perplexity AI allow you to complete both internal and external business processes faster than ever before.
In this article, we will explain eight ways in which AI adoption can benefit your business.
We’ll also cover some of the limitations of AI and how this technology will overcome these setbacks in the near future.
8 Ways How AI Can Boost Your New Business
Before delving any further, it’s important to understand that AI technology is more available than ever before. Entrepreneurs like yourself have used it to propel themselves to success, so you can take this as inspiration.
In addition to having a myriad of AI tools to choose from, the cost of creating platforms using this technology has decreased significantly.
This, in turn, has created the perfect conditions for many new technology brands to enter the market with advanced tools that cater to all types of businesses.
Whether you’re looking into leveraging social media platforms, automating HR tasks, or fulfilling a technical process within your business, you’re bound to find an AI tool designed for that specific application.
Here are eight ways that AI can currently benefit your business.
1. Improving Efficiency and Productivity
One of the differences between AI business tools and personal assistants is that the former can help you improve efficiency and productivity across the board.
The reason for this is that AI tools can help you complete tasks quickly and predictably. This includes simple repetitive tasks that, even though easy, are known to generate fatigue and slow down employees.
Instead, you can use AI to:
2. Enhanced Decision Making
Whether you are choosing suppliers, opening hours, or the best time to implement a brand realignment plan, you have to make big decisions to achieve long-term success.
The problem here is that many companies make decisions based on assumptions rather than taking into account historic data and all other variables that ultimately impact business performance.
AI is a fantastic tool in these cases because it can help you collect, parse, and interpret large data sets. This means you can use AI tools to transform raw data into an actionable plan to determine if you should add new features, product lines, and other changes.
3. Comprehensive Marketing Personalization
The marketing industry is usually at the forefront of digital technology.
As a matter of fact, digital is now one of the most common forms of marketing. And, as is to be expected, AI tools have already had a significant impact on this business practice.
For starters, marketers can leverage AI to conduct competitor analysis, a process that’s usually performed manually.
It’s still important to get a free downloadable VPN and mask your IP while reviewing the competition manually. Yet, using AI tools to analyze the same competitors can help you gain insights that simply aren’t there when performing a manual review.
Marketers can leverage AI technology to analyze marketing big data statistics and identify trends among these values. This whole process is faster than the manual alternative. Which, in turn, saves your marketing team a huge amount of time.
Furthermore, AI technology plays a crucial role in digital ad platforms like Google Ads and similar networks. For example, AI is essential in real-time bidding, which is the process used to determine which ads are displayed on a website.
So, if you’ve ever used online advertising solutions like Facebook Ads, you’ve already benefited from the power of AI.
4. Customer Experience and Self-Service
Creating a positive customer experience is essential for businesses that want to boost engagement. This is important because users who are engaged with your company’s content are more likely to be receptive to your marketing messages.
74% of users feel more connected to a brand when they can reach out via messages. With AI, you can ensure that your customers always receive a reply, even when your team is not online.
Moreover, AI chatbots can also work as a self-serve alternative for your customers. Depending on the level of integration and extent of the AI technology, customers may be able to change account information, make payments, request documentation, and fulfill other tasks through your chatbot.
5. Innovation and Competitive Advantage
Today, consumers expect more from the brands they choose. For example, 59% of all customers expect companies to reply within two hours of being contacted, regardless of the industry or size of the businesses they’re interacting with.
Here, AI works as a double resource that can make your brand stand out for being innovative and act as a competitive advantage for your business.
Besides notifying users when their messages have been received, you can also implement an AI system that sends out automatic updates when there’s a significant change on a client account.
So, your customers can receive automatic notifications for their new payment cycle or any other event you deem fit.
6. Better Reputation Management and Monitoring
Reputation management is the practice of monitoring and administering your company’s business profiles online.
The idea is to create a good name for your brand and instill confidence in your potential customers as well as your existing clients.
As part of this, customers expect you to have standard, updated company information across all your platforms because it’s a sign of professionalism and safety.
In these cases, AI can be a great resource here because it can be used to keep your phone number, address, and all other details updated across the different platforms your customers use to rate your services.
7. Internal Process Analysis and Improvement
Many companies struggle to perform internal analyses. Simply appointing the right team can be complicated, as human emotions and interpersonal relations may influence the outcome of your report.
Artificial intelligence is a great solution in these scenarios because it helps you analyze your processes without bias.
Not only this, but workflow automation tools powered by AI can help you improve the repetitive processes that your team is currently completing manually.
8. More Effective Sales Processes
The sales process is unique for every company, and your business is no exception.
With that said, taking a standard approach, for example, building sales funnels, can help you generate a predictable volume of leads and sales.
AI can greatly assist in these efforts by moving prospects down the sales funnel, helping you repurpose content, and qualifying leads based on the types of interactions you’re registering.
Finally, AI tools can generate sales reports, identify consumer patterns, and help you gain a new angle on the data being collected.
Potential Challenges and Limitations of AI
Simply put, AI enables machines to display what humans consider intelligent behavior. This includes the ability to communicate, generate new ideas, interpret stimuli, and many other actions.
AI assistants like Apple’s Siri have existed for some time. However, one of the biggest characteristics of these intelligent tools was that they only operated within the realm of one device.
In Siri’s case, the actions and knowledge available are all limited to each user’s individual iPhone. New, more advanced tools have the power to operate in and draw information from the internet as a whole, but this technology does present unique challenges and limitations.
Let’s take a look at some areas of improvement in AI technology and what this means for your business.
1. Energy Efficiency
AI systems make decisions based on a myriad of variables. ChatGPT, for instance, evaluates 175 billion parameters before generating a response for its users.
However, this also requires a lot of computing power, which translates to low energy efficiency. Now, this is a major challenge because the lower the energy efficiency, the higher the cost of AI tools.
Sources of renewable energy pose a great alternative to solve this issue, as well as the development of more effective technology that requires less computing power.
2. Trust and Adoption Issues
Humans like to understand the tools they use. However, many AI tools don’t have code transparency. Some platforms process data using algorithms that are so complex that advanced developers can not determine how their processes actually work.
This creates a major trust issue, which in turn, leads to adoption issues. The solution to this is a combination of transparent coding practices and the publication of useful resources that help them see the value of AI.
3. Data Protection and Privacy
The average user is more concerned for their privacy today than ever before, and chatbots don’t always align with this newfound trend.
Machine learning and other AI models are based on the data they have available. But, these programs can’t deduce if the data is being used for bad purposes like unethical promotion campaigns.
What’s more, chatbots are also vulnerable to hacking, so a security breach in the system can compromise the details of all users in the database.
This can be resolved through the adoption of stronger privacy standards and adherence to regulations like the GDPR.
Conclusion
AI is already being used in highly-technical industries like manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce.
Now, entrepreneurs of all levels have access to intelligent software that can help them improve productivity, make better decisions, create a better customer experience, and leverage innovative technology.
Furthermore, many AI platforms offer a competitive advantage, help build a better reputation, and allow for a more effective sales process. And while there are limitations, it’s only a matter of time until AI is advanced enough to overcome these challenges.
Author’s bio:
Mark has a BSc in computer science with a focus on cryptography, and he worked in a range of London tech startups in data security for five years before turning his hand to writing.
His goal is to educate and inform people about the often opaque world of cybersecurity and help everyone be a little bit safer online. When not saving the world from hackers and fraudsters, he’s a gamer, esports fan, and avid TV binger.
