Machine learning can be leveraged to improve and supplement many business processes, from coding to marketing. Here are eight ways in which machine learning is changing business.
1. Assuring Quality
You can implement a machine learning framework to do many different tasks at your organization. One of the best uses of these frameworks is quality assurance. Developers can build a framework and use it to catch and fix bugs in programs throughout development and testing. While some bugs are still complex enough that they require manual repair, machine learning can be taught to recognize and fix common or simple issues in software. That said, machine learning frameworks are constantly improving and learning to work on more complicated bugs.
2. Automating Processes
One of the main ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are currently being leveraged is in automating tasks and processes. This usage frees employees up to work on more creative, hands-on or delicate tasks, depending on the industry. While humans work on projects that require human ingenuity, machine learning can be taught to automate certain repetitive tasks, such as building machinery according to programmed instructions, analyzing data and checking for errors. Machine learning can improve the speed and accuracy of these tasks by avoiding human error.
3. Improving Data Analytics
Machine learning has already greatly improved the speed of data analytics processes. The faster speed and more accurate analyses improve many aspects of business, especially sales and marketing. Your sales team will be able to leverage machine learning to quickly study current market trends, how these trends change over time and what markets may look like in the future. These uses help sales teams improve marketing campaigns and sales forecasting.
4. Optimizing Servers
You can leverage machine learning to improve server optimization and other customer service tools. AI can curate your servers and the queries received from users to enhance operating speed and capacity and prevent servers from lagging. With machine learning, you can greatly improve your server capacity and operations, allowing employees to work on other software tasks than just making sure the servers are healthy.
5. Providing Better Support
You can utilize machine learning frameworks in departments like customer support, too. AI applications can offer consistent 24-hour support, mainly in the form of chatbots and automated phone responses. These programs are currently rather simple and can direct customers to a customer support employee for more complicated queries, but programmers are working to create more robust AI programs that can take on more difficult queries.
6. Improving Recommendations
One of the earliest uses of AI was to improve the recommendations companies make to customers. Every company can use AI to figure out market trends, check popular purchases and make recommendations based on that data. Machine learning frameworks improve their analytics applications constantly to continuously improve their recommendation-making abilities. The focus now is to expand from taking into account a user’s purchase history to recommend novel products to users. If someone tends to only buy hair care products that are on sale, his or her purchase history may be spotty, which can baffle current AI programs.
7. Supplementing Research
You might be surprised to learn you can leverage machine learning and AI even in your legal department. You can incorporate a machine learning framework into your legal department’s software programs to help employees parse legal documents such as contracts. Machine learning applications can quickly scan these documents and pull the most important or relevant topics for specific questions or cases. This can greatly reduce the time spent researching and reading documentation, allowing employees to access the information they need quickly and efficiently.
AI can also help most departments find ways to cut costs, find funding or otherwise use funding more efficiently. This is another benefit of the speed and efficiency of machine learning research applications. You can tell an application what keywords or scenarios to search for, and it will be able to find them and even generate possible plans of action in a fraction of the time it would take a team of human researchers.
8. Securing Systems
It may not be the first thing you think to use machine learning for, but AI can be a huge boon to securing your company’s online presence. The IT industry has been developing AI that works with mobile and traditional cybersecurity systems. These AI applications can be taught to recognize potential breaches and attacks in real-time, as well as the best ways to counter each type of attack. Rather than a static firewall, a machine learning application can be a dynamic defense, learning more about different attacks as it works. It can improve and bolster your cybersecurity defenses in real-time.
Machine learning is a quickly growing and improving set of tools that can be utilized by many industries. These applications will continue to change the business world for years to come as they continue to learn and improve.
