Smart technologies are changing the ways we do business in recent times. Today, it has become possible and fashionable for machines or computers to be programmed to perform specific intelligent tasks while we focus on other aspects of our business. Business owners that deploy artificial intelligence technology in their business reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, maximize revenue, and enhance customer experience. In today’s podcast, Chris Hood, a digital strategist, and technology entrepreneur, and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss how artificial intelligence affects business operations.
Summary
How AI (Artificial intelligence) Is Starting to Shift and Affect Business
Artificificial intelligence has become a buzzword in our everyday life. Although an emerging technology, AI is gradually revolutionizing virtually every sector of the economy, including automobiles, healthcare, businesses, and more. For example, the imprint of AI can be readily seen in the product innovations like self-driving cars and personal assistants.
Research by Semrush shows that the increased adoption of artificial intelligence by businesses will create $2.9 trillion in business values and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity in 2021. Leveraging artificial intelligence to run your small business can be a great boon as it will help streamline your business operation and, in turn, boost your revenue.
With artificial intelligence, you can engage your customer more efficiently and discover more effective selling strategies to market your product.
Read on to know how AI can affect your small business and enhance productivity.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
As business owners, we are constantly confronted and challenged with new concepts as a result of never-ending innovations. This is the major reason we must keep learning to keep tabs on the numerous information and opportunities that can help facilitate our business.
That said, artificial intelligence, in its broadest definition, refers to the science and engineering of developing intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs to facilitate human activities. In other words, it involves leveraging computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. For example, the use of chatbots to respond to customers’ queries.
What Are the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Business
Running a business means that you’re often pulled from many different directions. You likely have a schedule or workload filled with tasks or problems at every waking moment, and it is challenging to attend to all these obligations without some automation.
That’s where using artificial intelligence can help you accomplish your business goals and growth. Whether your business is threading through water or you want to improve your processes, AI can facilitate your business operation and help you reach your goals pretty quickly.
Below are the varying ways AI can help smoothen your business day to day:
- It helps save time and money by automating and optimizing routine tasks
- It improves operational efficiency leading to increased throughput
- It helps you to make decisions faster based on outputs from cognitive technologies
- It helps minimize human errors, especially in the area of computation and data analysis
- It provides insight into customer preferences and offers a better, personalized experience
- It helps in the aggregation and collation of data to generate quality leads and expand the customer base
- It maximizes sales opportunities, thereby increasing revenue
Which Business Cases Are Better Solved By Artificial Intelligence
Today, many businesses are leveraging artificial intelligence to solve their varying problems. For example, AI has proved to be a very reliable factor in customer service, data preparation and governance, marketing, and more.
Customer service 
As your business grows, the need for more assistance in your customer service increases. For small owners, it can be costly to get more hands that will help attend to your ever-growing customer base.
However, you can effectively meet your customers’ demands with innovative technologies such as virtual agents. Virtual agents are rapidly replacing human agents in providing customer support. For instance, they can help answer frequently asked questions (FAQS), provide personalized advice, engage customers across websites, social media platforms, and more.
Examples of virtual agents are messaging bots on e-commerce websites and messaging apps like slack, Facebook messenger, or voice assistants.
Organization of data and data governance
AI saves you time cleaning and organizing data relevant to your business. In other words, it helps to filter and classify valuable data from a large dataset in a way it will provide context and reduce the rigor involved if otherwise left to an individual.
Many businesses leverage artificial intelligence in data management and classification in order to reduce costs and time and provide business insights.
Management
When a business grows and takes in new employees and processes, it becomes more complex to manage. Over time, you might veer from your normal mode of operation, leading to operational inefficiencies and hampering the business from achieving its goals.
To streamline the operational efficiency of your business, you can leverage specialized algorithms to gain insight into the root causes of your deviation from your process norm in order to improve and keep track of your business goals.
Marketing
Artificial intelligence plays an important role in marketing by helping marketers gain an informed and comprehensive understanding of their target audience. In addition, AI marketing tools utilize customer data to learn how to communicate and deliver personalized messages without the marketing team’s mediation.
With AI, you can make fast decisions on allocating funds across your marketing media channels. Plus, it will help you analyze the most effective platform that engages customers so that you get the most value out of your marketing efforts.
Learn About Our Guest
Chris Hood is a digital strategist, technology entrepreneur, and innovation executive at Google with over 35 years of experience in online business development and transformation. Mr. Hood teaches in the business and information technology departments at Southern New Hampshire University and Colorado Technical University. He previously worked for Fox Broadcasting, Disney, and Electronic Arts and was the co-founder of Blind Squirrel Games.
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