by May Habib
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction — it is here, and is already making a big impact on businesses across a range of industries and sizes.
Incorporating AI into small to medium sized business operations will soon be mission-critical in order to stay competitive. Many business processes can today be improved or even taken over completely by AI, such as customer service and support, employee scheduling, data analysis, expense management, legal and minor contract drafting, digital marketing, and customer acquisition.
In this article, we will explore the present state of AI solutions and how business owners are prioritizing putting the technology to work.
Prioritizing Areas for AI Investment
Incorporating AI into business operations will soon be critical in order to stay competitive. The issue to tackle first is how to prioritize, and there are two ways that SMBs could go about prioritizing areas for AI investment:
- Which automated solutions have the potential for greatest business impact, whether in cost reduction or revenue expansion, on your business?
- Which team members do you desperately need to become more strategic and less focused on tactical or repetitive tasks?
- Digital Marketing
- Customer Support
- Supply Chains
- Employee Scheduling
- Customer Acquisition
- Data Analytics
Digital Marketing
In digital marketing, AI can be used to create more personalized and targeted campaigns. It can be used to segment customers, to understand their needs and preferences, and to create and deliver personalized content. Tools like Writer, Metadata.io, and Attentive Mobile can put your programmatic web and text marketing on autopilot.
Customer Support
In customer support, AI can be used to provide more personalized and efficient online service. It can be used to automate simple tasks, like sending out automatic responses to common queries, and to provide more complex support, like answering questions about products and services. Tools like Forethought are a great way to be helpful and responsive to customers 24/7 without the headcount.
Supply Chains
AI is also being used to create more efficient and effective supply chains. It can be used to forecast demand, to optimize stock levels, and to track and manage shipments. Tools like KlearNow can help with managing supply chains.
Employee Scheduling
Manual scheduling is a time-consuming process that requires your managers to balance various factors to achieve a smooth and effective plant that benefits your company and its employees. Implementing an AI-driven scheduling application can offer various benefits leading to higher productivity and increased revenues all with just one click, according to TeamBridge.
Customer Acquisition
Identity marketing that creates relationships between businesses and their customers can be time-consuming and expensive. Artificial intelligence can help companies lower these costs while helping connect them with consumers, from boosting a company’s search engine ranking so that a prospect finds a business’ website to answering questions and making the ordering process more effortless, according to Analytics Insight.
Data Analytics
Marketing AI Institute offers a handful of powerful use cases where AI can aid in data analytics:
Discover New Insights
AI excels at finding insights and patterns in large datasets that humans cannot see, and also recommends actions based on opportunities it is seeing in your analytics.
Predict Business & Marketing Outcomes
AI-powered systems can analyze data from hundreds of sources and offer predictions about what works and what does not, as well as deep dive into data analytics about your customers and offer predictions about consumer preferences, product development, and marketing channels.
Unify Analytics & Customer Data
AI can be used to unify data across platforms. That includes the speed and scale of AI to pull together all of your customer data into a single, unified view.
Forecast Demand
Thanks to its predictive abilities, AI can use your analytics data to forecast product demand based on available stock, seasonal trends, past purchase behavior, and more.
There are a wide variety of different ways that AI can boost your small business. Consider AI implementation today and watch your goals come to fruition.
May Habib is founder and CEO at Writer, an AI writing assistant built for teams. She is an expert in natural language processing and the evolving ways we use language online.