Artificial intelligence (AI) is a great tool for streamlining and improving the efficiency of many kinds of businesses. No matter your niche, it’s highly likely you’ll benefit somehow from implementing AI programs. Here are eight ways AI can improve your business.
1. Analyzing Data
AI is an outstanding tool for assisting in data analytics. This is because of how good AI algorithms are at recognizing and interpreting patterns. You can even teach AI to recognize more complex patterns over time and to develop insights from its interpretations of those patterns. While human beings still need to take those insights and develop them into actionable projects and campaigns, AI can greatly expedite the process of actually performing the analysis and predicting outcomes.
2. Improving Manufacturing Processes
The most common way in which AI is utilized by businesses is in automation, particularly in terms of manufacturing. On a factory floor, there is always the potential for accidents, no matter how safe you try to make the environment. Automating your manufacturing process helps keep humans out of danger. If you can’t automate entirely, you can program AI and robots to interact safely with humans, for example, by recognizing when a human is in their path and changing course to avoid a collision. Automation also helps speed up your production rates significantly, without sacrificing product efficacy, quality or safety.
3. Automating Workflows
Not only can AI be leveraged to automate mechanical processes, but it can also be used to automate many repetitive software-based tasks. Such tasks include scheduling, data entry, troubleshooting, transferring data and populating or extracting data from documentation. Leveraging AI to automate these workflows frees up your employees to work on other, more resource-intensive or time-consuming work, such as project development, product updates or marketing campaigns. Much like automating manufacturing processes, automating workflows ensures that these tasks can be performed more quickly without sacrificing any quality or effectiveness.
4. Scaling Operations More Easily
Because of their effectiveness at automating processes and workflows, collecting data and providing predictive analytics, AI programs are capable of aiding your business in scaling operations. One of the most common tools for scalability, machine learning operations, or mlops, assists businesses in scaling their production capacity up or down to improve organization, allocation and results. These scalability tools incorporate the efficiency of automated workflows, the accuracy and speed of data analytics and the capabilities of predictive modeling to provide a continuous cycle of development, deployment and monitoring, which ensures operations run smoothly and are scaled up or down as needed.
5. Encouraging Engagement
AI programs have some potential to encourage both customer and employee engagement, most commonly in the form of research assistance and customer service. It may be used to perform simple customer service work in the form of chatbots, as well as to assist employees in conducting research more quickly by finding keywords and relevant data in your records. For example, if you have a list of frequently asked questions from customers, you can feed those to an AI and task it with troubleshooting for the customers who ask those questions, allowing your employees to focus on more complex problems.
6. Facilitating Communication
Because of its ability to collect and sort data, as well as its ability to assist in many aspects of workflows, AI is a solid tool for facilitating communication. Employees can use AI to search for keywords and more easily find relevant documentation or links to share with customers or other employees. Certain AI programs can act as digital assistants, recording and transcribing important meetings and calls for future reference. Digital assistant technology can also be applied to chatbots, making them more engaging and authentic to customers who utilize them.
7. Assisting Content Creation
AI isn’t a match for human creativity and ingenuity, so it isn’t the best tool for creating content wholesale, but its pattern recognition and data analytics capabilities make it an important asset in content creation. To generate effective content for marketing campaigns, FAQ pages and more, you need to gather as much data on your customers’ needs, interests and wants as you can. This data helps writers develop engaging, effective, well-researched copy for your ads and your website.
8. Improving Recruitment and Retention
AI is quite an effective human resources tool, as well. If your company has a deluge of applications to sort through, AI programs can assist your HR department in doing so, by searching for relevant keywords in the applications and narrowing down best-suited candidates. You can utilize AI’s task automation to assist in the onboarding process, scheduling interviews and sending out paperwork for new employees to review. AI can also be effective for retention, by improving employee engagement, communication and performance.
AI is a game-changer in so many ways. Whatever market your company’s focus is, you’ll discover and develop plenty of strategies for improvement that involve or are based on AI.
