Artificial intelligence is a wide term used to refer to machines that are programmed to mimic some of the reasoning qualities of humans. These qualities help machines in making rational decisions like humans.
Have you been talking to Siri all day or using face recognition to unlock your phone? They are all examples of AI in our daily lives.
Businesses employing AI have made tremendous profits. Research by PwC quotes that AI will provide a global growth of $15.7 trillion by 2030. Such is the impact of this technology.
AI is good for your business because it will help you save time and money by smart automation of your business processes. For example, data analysis which requires many employees can be done faster with one single AI-powered machine.
It will also help you gain productivity as boring entry-level jobs like data entry could be done by AI bots. It frees up your labor for higher-value tasks.
A recent paper published by MIT titled “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work” suggests that AI will not be replacing human jobs, but making companies more profitable, so they can generate more jobs.
But how can a company integrate AI into its business operations? It’s so easy to say that your IT team can work on AI and help your business operations team. But what if your IT team doesn’t understand business operations and your operations team is not well versed in interpreting data? This could create a misunderstanding leading to unnecessary delays. This is where MLOps comes into use.
MLops for your business can help you To create a better communication flow between your employees on the IT team and those on the operations side.
It is a similar expression to what we already know as DevOps (a combination of people working on the design and building of big data).
What Is the Role of AI in Business?
Any business, be it a small company or a large corporation, is using AI at some level every day. From a virtual assistant like Siri to driverless cars, AI is finding its application everywhere. To understand what AI stands for in business, you must first understand the problems associated with businesses today.
When everything from buying clothes to buying real estate shifted to online channels, the amount of data generated has increased tenfold. The very first role of AI is to analyze this data faster than humans and produce significant results that can help companies make better decisions.
Another important role of AI in business is product development. By doing tons of research and experimentation, AI is helping make better products. The customer management system (CRM) can be automated to solve queries faster. Even your cybersecurity network can be strengthened with the use of artificial intelligence.
AI thus stands for simplifying your business needs, increasing your profit margins, and solving your complex data-related work in minutes. It is helping businesses in all verticals, be it increasing revenue, cost-saving, or simplifying work.
That is why businesses are shifting to an AI-first model. Companies like Microsoft and Google are describing themselves as AI-first. This means they are embedding AI in their very basic core operations to change the entire way of doing business.
Startups who take the leap of faith and integrate AI in their basic functions will get an edge over others in today’s competitive market.
Benefits of AI for Your Business
We have been talking previously about how beneficial AI is for your business. Let’s try to understand its benefits with relevant examples, so you can understand what will be the impact of artificial intelligence in business.
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Increasing Efficiency
Increasing efficiency means generating more revenue using fewer resources. Using AI, businesses can increase their efficiency. For example, if you are an online retailer, you can use AI tools to target customers based on your data of their likes and dislikes.
This way you will be able to earn more using a simple AI analytics tool. As less manpower, money, or time is spent on it, you end up making more profits.
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Analyzing Data for Better Planning
AI analyses tons of data every day to predict patterns for your business. This pattern is compared with historical data to give you feedback that could be used for future references. This process is called predictive analysis and is increasingly being used to drive online sales.
It also helps businesses prepare better strategies when they know what might happen in the future for them. For example, you can use AI to estimate sales for next week. This sales forecasting can help you prepare your inventory accordingly and also manage cash flow.
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Product Innovation
Companies are increasingly using AI software to predict people’s interest and accommodate it within their products. For example, a beverage company uses AI and machine learning to research customers’ tastes and eating habits using data analytics.
A set of algorithms helps them predict what is trending in the market and what people are preferring. They innovate their drinks accordingly. Thus AI has been helping businesses revolutionize the way they research their customers.
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Boosting Customer Experience
This is one of the most common and useful benefits of AI. Chatbots and voice assistants are being increasingly used by companies to enhance their customer service experience. Research predicts that there will be around 8.4 billion voice assistants by 2024.
This will free up the skilled workers for more complex work. It will also help customers get faster query resolution without having to wait on the phone line for hours. All you need to do is choose a well constructed chatbots for your business. These chatbots and voice assistants will take care of the best customer service that you wish to provide your customers.
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Smart Automation to Save Money and Time
AI automation saves time as AI machines can do repetitive things like data entry in minutes. It saves you money because the same data entry work that requires 10 people, is getting done by one machine.
These skilled people can do more complex work for you, which eventually generates more profits for your business. The work done by automated tools is also free from any error.
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Security Improvement
AI is being increasingly used in cybersecurity infrastructure to detect viruses and other anomalies. AI scans the entire system to check for any threat and notifies the security team in case of any discrepancy.
This is a complex process that requires 24/7 attention to detail. Such work can be and should be delegated to machines. This AI software is also error-free, so they help humans by simplifying tasks.
How Can AI Help Customers?
AI helps customers by giving them a personalized experience, tailor-made for each customer. Suppose your website welcomes members with a personalized message addressing them with their names. Wouldn’t it highlight an enhanced customer experience for them?
AI also customizes the web pages of your website according to each member. It does so by noting their likes, dislikes via tracking their search results through an algorithm. It then suggests to them the products that they might be interested in.
This data-driven customer insight helps you in selling more products and your customers are also happy with this proactive support. Even when customers are confused about whether to buy a product or not, your AI chatbot can help them make the right decision by pointing out various facts and figures.
This helps customers make the right decision. AI chatbots also answer basic questions of customers on chat. This helps increase client satisfaction since the same would have required more time via a call. It also frees up your employees for more complex work and services.
How Can AI Help Business Organizations in Their Business Process
AI has something to offer in every field of your business, be it recruitment, customer service, product innovation, or sales and marketing. The biggest benefit of AI for your business is automation.
It automates the regular, tedious data-driven work, which can be done faster and with low errors with the help of AI. Your skilled workers are then free to do other more complex tasks.
We have compiled some relevant AI components that companies are using in their daily business processes.
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Predictive Analysis
AI uses machine language and various analytics tools to compare historical data with the present data to give you a clear roadmap for future sales and profits. These predictive sales forecasts help you to plan better business ideas and sales targets.
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Natural Language Processing
This technology involves the conversion of data into text and speech and vice versa. By using it, you can go through customer chats and comments on your website to get insight into each customer’s behavior.
You can then tailor-make the customer experience according to their liking. This addresses customer needs and desires and thus helps enhance customer experience.
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Chatbots
This AI-powered software is being increasingly used to simplify the customer service experience of e-commerce companies. Their benefits include the 24/7 availability of a customer care executive to answer customer needs.
This way, you are not only saving upon the cost of hiring humans for simple queries but the same humans can get involved in more complex tasks which will bring you more profits.
AI has a vast application in simplifying your business processes. We just mentioned a few to give you an idea of how AI can drive your business better and give you increased sales profits.
How Can Small Businesses Utilize AI to Help Grow Their Businesses
Gone are the days when AI was reserved as something that only big corporations could take advantage of. AI has become a daily necessity in life.
But what will be the impact of artificial intelligence in business for small companies? Let’s understand it this way. From booking movie tickets to asking random questions to Alexa, AI is everywhere. It would serve to be an asset for small companies without increasing their cost.
Some ways that small businesses can use AI to grow are:
- Integrate AI chatbots to answer frequently asked questions of customers. This will decrease the waiting time of customers on call to speak to an actual person. This diminishes the need to hire more customer care executives. Thereby, reducing your business costs.
- You can even coach your sales team with AI insights. This will help them make better pitches and sales decisions, thereby increasing your profits,
- Use AI to personalize the experience for your customers, tap into email marketing, or simply customize your website according to customer preferences.
- You can automate HR tasks and even strengthen your cybersecurity network with AI.
Several people ask if AI is better than machine learning for small businesses. Machine learning is a part of AI itself. AI is a whole system that incorporates machines to think intelligently like humans.
What Is the Future of AI in Business?
AI will transform the traditional business ecosystem over the next few decades. Companies have already started using them for a wide range of applications like customer support, sales and marketing analysis, and to eliminate the need for employees for low-level data entry work.
The future may see jobs getting eliminated due to AI taking over certain business tasks. But as the profits increase, businesses will hire more manpower for complex, innovative tasks.
Amazon, for instance, has fully automated warehouses where bots are used to maintain its functionality. That leaves Amazon to utilize humans for better, skilled tasks.
To summarize, AI will go on to increase profits for businesses, simplify their mundane tasks. It will refine the customer experience.
There will not be any sector of business that will not utilize the power of AI in the future, be it healthcare, education, or manufacturing, AI will find its usage in every field. Are you still asking yourself, what will be the impact of artificial intelligence in business?
How Does AI Affect Online Shopping and E-Commerce Business?
AI finds its application in large quantities on the e-commerce platform. Amazon’s product recommendation technology is a stellar example of AI for online shopping. AI simplifies the tasks at the business end and enhances the experience of shopping at the customer’s end.
Let’s see how.
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Auto Suggestions
AI auto-suggests people when searching for a product on the search bar. This helps users find products whose names they might not remember. This recommendation method gets stronger when combined with machine learning.
By ML, e-commerce websites learn the pattern of shopping by a user and suggest products based on their likes, dislikes and search history. This will generate more profits for businesses.
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Chatbots
Chatbots and other digital assistants are answering users’ simple queries regarding their products on online chats. They are also available 24/7. This enhances customer experiences as support is available immediately day and night.
It also frees the customer executive to take on complex customer issues proactively and resolve them in time.
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Hyper Personalisation
Customer data is being used to develop insight into each customer by using AI and machine learning. This data is being used to give a personalized experience to each customer.
This means that when a customer opens an online shopping website, he will see products that he is most likely to buy displayed on the front page. An AI bot would also welcome him by displaying his name. All this enhances your customer’s service experience.
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Supply Chain Management
AI-enabled inventory management and AI-enabled supply chain automation have been simplifying tedious tasks.
It is also making deliveries faster as data analytics tracks the nearest warehouse where the product is available and ships the products to the customer’s address from that warehouse. If not for AI, manually finding a warehouse nearest to the customer’s location is a harder task.
AI makes inventory management smarter by providing more data such as, which items are more likely to be in demand shortly based on already existing sales data.
These are not all, but a few ways that AI has been benefiting online e-commerce websites and shoppers.
How Will AI Impact Your Current Jobs?
Many scholars believe that AI will be a ” job snatcher”, while others believe that AI will be a “job enabler”. The 2020 Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum estimated that while automation will eliminate 85 million jobs, it will also create around 97 million more jobs by 2025!
AI will displace repetitive tasks like data entry. It will also eliminate certain dangerous tasks in assembly line manufacturing. This will free the worker for higher-value jobs that require some interpersonal skills. These creative, strategic tasks will give more pay to the workers and more profits to the business.
The future of jobs is also safe with AI. Artificial intelligence will be an assistant to humans to simplify their work and not to take over their work! But this also means that the majority of low-skilled workers doing clerical jobs will need reskilling to join higher-skilled jobs.
How Is AI Impacting the Workforce?
AI is set to bring a revolution in the way work is done at companies. It will bring in more systematic monitoring of work output. This will help in increasing labor productivity. On the other hand, AI will also find applications in hiring processes. It can scan the resumes of candidates to find the people most suitable for a job. There are also AI for talent acquisition which can take care of the entire talent acquisition process. This eliminates the burdensome task of the HR department to call many people for the screening round.
AI training programs made for upskilling workers will also find application in various industries. Predictive analysis is also being used in research and product innovation. The future will see machines and humans working side by side in companies.
The impact of artificial intelligence in business will be a positive one.
How Will AI Impact the IT Industry?
AI has many segments like machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and speech recognition. However, the IT industry uses two segments the most. These are deep learning and machine learning.
Some ways that these technologies are impacting the IT industry are:
- Software testing for quality assurance (QA) is done by a QA expert. This is now getting handled by AI in a few companies. It makes the process easier, faster, and with less or no error. The QA experts are not overloaded with data handling then.
- Social media analysis is being done to predict market trends and customer behavior. This process uses data analytics tools of AI to extract important information from big data. This enables the sales and marketing team to plan better campaigns.
- Self-serving service desks are saving time for the customer service department. AI also helps software developers in their operational processes.
AI is being called the ” future of computer programming”. AiOps ( AI for IT operations) is a term that’s being increasingly used to signify the growing effect of AI on the IT industry. AI will revolutionize the IT sector to become more productive, build more secure systems, and automate processes for faster results.
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How Will AI Affect the Economy?
AI will have a huge effect on the economy. This sounds true if we see the recent transition in economic activities from physical stores to online marketplaces.
Online businesses are growing. This means their demand for technological innovations is also growing. For example, the biggest currency treasure is cryptocurrency right now, which has no physical safe or building. It is run entirely by software that has adapted to learning by automation.
AI has the potential of increasing the GDP of countries. It will impact every sector of the economy to improve labor productivity, customer service, etc. What will be the impact of artificial intelligence in business, is an exciting question to look forward to.
How AI Is Used in Marketing?
A research study says that 66% of customers expect companies to know their needs and expectations. The question is how will companies know it?
AI is the tool that will help businesses understand customer wants and needs and incorporate the same in their marketing strategy. That is why AI is so important for marketing.
Let’s see a few ways AI is used in marketing:
- AI marketing helps businesses in utilizing data that they obtain from websites, email marketing, and other social media sources. This data is sorted by analytical tools to obtain relevant patterns and information that could be used to do targeted marketing.
- The powerful customer insight generated by AI helps in sales forecasting. This helps in doing customer segmentation. Companies can plan better marketing campaigns after deciding their target audience.
- AI is also used to create a personalized customer experience. Suppose you visit a website that recommends products based on your previous purchases. You are more likely to buy from it.
- AI is being increasingly used in PPC advertising. Using AI you will be able to target more advertisement platforms that may get skipped by human insight alone. This way, your lead generation will increase.
AI is an efficient tool that can revolutionize the marketing ecosystem for companies. Brands like Nike, BMW, Amazon, etc. have been using it for enhancing their marketing strategies.
The future of marketing will get more competitive with brands trying to occupy spaces in the same niche. AI can prove to be a wild card for brands that start benefiting from it right now!
You have to think clearly about what will be the impact of artificial intelligence in business if you start exploring its potential now.
How Is AI Changing SEO?
Artificial intelligence is rapidly bringing a change in every aspect of the business. Search engine optimization (SEO) won’t be left behind. SEO criteria help in improving the search results of a website on google.
With the help of AI, you can not only discover relevant gaps in your content but also rank your website higher in search results. But how?
As we know the main factor that affects content ranking is user experience. AI is proving to be one of the best tools to provide users with a good website experience. This may lead to users spending more time on your website. This will lower the bounce rate (how fast users leave your website) and help you rank higher.
Powerful AI SEO tools are helping companies discover keywords that may take them above their competitors. Once you have found the relevant keywords, the AI tools also scourge the internet to find all the content that is created around your keywords.
You can then make a perfect content strategy to fill the gaps in those content and produce content that will organically attract more audience attention. AI tools will also help you optimize your content to satisfy all the E.A.T. standards of Google.
With a large number of customers using voice for searching products online, voice SEO has gained prominence. AI takes over the laborious, time taking job of the SEO and makes it easy for your content creation team to work on complex tasks.
How Can AI Help Financial Services?
AI has been helping in all sectors of the economy. Financial services are not untouched. Banks and other financial businesses have started relying on AI for faste
r and more effective work. Let’s understand this with some relevant examples.
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Automating Mundane, Manual Work.
A bank processes a credit card application by entering it in their database, reviewing it, verifying it, and finally generating a risk score. After all, this happens, a client is onboarded.
AI can automate this data entry task to do it in a few minutes with zero errors. This will leave your employees to do more complex value-adding tasks. It also adds to your customer experience if customers have to spend less time on their application processing.
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AI Helps in Preventing Fraud
As fraudsters are becoming more tech-driven, banks also need to adopt technologies that can help them prevent fraud. AI is one such technology. It can detect patterns in a transaction based on static data and dynamic data of customers.
This pattern helps in identifying any unauthorized transaction that may cause a loss to the bank or customers.
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Enhance Your Customers Experience
Since manual tedious work gets completed in less time and fraud detection is at its best level, your business is already winning at customer retention.
AI also helps investment bankers offer more customized investment recommendations based on a customer’s previous investment records and market statistics. This will help you gain customer trust since you will be ahead of your competitors in giving better investment results.
FAQs
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How Will Artificial Intelligence Affect the Future?
Artificial intelligence will affect the future positively. It will help businesses increase their productivity, lower their costs and increase profits by automating low-level, data-related mundane tasks. This will also free up the skilled workers who will then do more creative and innovative work for companies.
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What is the Future of Artificial Intelligence?
The future of AI is full of growth potential. We have already seen AI integrating into our lives via Alexa, Siri, or face recognition apps to open our phones. The next decade would witness robots working side by side with humans as assistants to lower their manual and mundane work, so humans can focus on higher-value work.
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How Does Artificial Intelligence Disrupt Industries?
AI is set to disrupt the traditional way business is done in all sectors of the economy. It will do so by revolutionizing all 4 facets of the industry, i.e. production, supply chain, product innovation, sales, and marketing.
- It will increase production capacity by automating manual tasks.
- AI will regulate the supply chain by estimating transport costs, locating warehouses near the customer, involving bots in maintaining warehouses, etc.
- Data analytics will help in product innovation.
- AI will also help in sales and marketing by the use of predictive analysis and other relevant tools.
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Is AI in Business Analytics Critical for Business Growth?
Yes, AI can help drive your business growth by estimating patterns and information from a set of already available data which is hard to read otherwise. It produces new statistics and knowledge that can be utilized for making better business decisions.
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How Many Businesses Use AI?
AI finds its relevance in almost all sectors of the economy. From healthcare, IT, e-commerce to retail, finance, and digital marketing, all types of businesses have realized the potential benefits of AI and are willing to invest in it for more profits.
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Which Industry Will Benefit the Most From AI Value Creation?
All the industries are going to benefit from the utilization of AI. However, industries like logistics, cybersecurity, finance, manufacturing, and e-commerce could be its best beneficiaries. Any industry that realizes the potential of AI and starts using it from now onwards, will witness growth shortly.
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Is AI Disrupting Business For Companies?
AI is not disrupting business at the present moment. It is disrupting the way traditional business practices are done. It will automate business processes like hiring, product manufacturing, and even product transportation among other things.
All such factors will make more profits for businesses, without disrupting business opportunities. The impact of AI on businesses will be an effective one.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It is a fruit of our own creativity and is made to help businesses progress more rapidly. From increasing ROI to decreasing costs, AI will serve as a value-added component for your business needs.
Invest in AI trends now, if you want to get above your competitors in the next few years. From business to personal life, AI tools are seen everywhere. It’s high time that you ask yourself “what can I automate in my business?”.
