Artificial Intelligence: What is it and How does it Impact Business?
Artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life. AI which was considered a future technology used only in niche products, is now being used even in the household. AI is on the rise and it is changing both customer interaction and the way businesses work.
According to a report, European AI expenditure will grow 38% annually. Retail, banking, and manufacturers being the primary businesses*. We are observing a growing trend and increasing value of AI for European businesses today. For example, a tourism company used Artificial Intelligence to personalize offers to its audience and thereby amplified its revenue by 6 percent. A bank reduced fraudulent credit card transactions by 90 percent, thereby reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Machine Learning, NLP, or Image Recognition will bring better performance, lower costs and reinvent the customer experience. New things will arise and traditional ones will be redefined. Investments in Virtual Assistants will transform traditional customer service into automated support. A couple of years ago most companies were evaluating the potential of Artificial Intelligence and leaders were still uncertain if it was set to peak. Today, researches have shown that most organizations have embraced it. Companies are looking to implement AI at practical issues like data governance and more. Any company or organization which has not embraced AI and ML has only been left behind in the race.
Let’s dig a bit deeper and think about how AI can be used in businesses.
1. Make better decisions with data
The world we live in now has so much data, more data than ever before. Firstly, most organizations use AI widely to make better use of the data, understand trends, and draw decisions from them. The fact that 99% percent of the organizations do not use their data is surprising, and we are not even talking about using data for decision-making. The advantage of allowing AI to run on your data is you can uncover questions like — Is this a business question? Who is our most profitable audience? How much profit can a customer who belongs to a particular segment get us? Etc. The modern cloud infrastructure will automate most of the tasks for you. The more data set it runs on, the more accurate AI becomes, with the ability to observe more patterns.
2. Change the way you interact with customers
The second area where AI can help you is with personalization and providing more intelligent services automatically. This, of course, stems from the first point. If you are able to get data and understand what your customers want, it makes it that much easier to provide personalized services. But in this case, it is the AI that is doing the job for you. We see several tech giants using AI to its fullest. If you have shopped on Amazon, you might have observed how they recommend the best products to you. Netflix makes its service more enticing by using AI. They’re not only suggesting a particular movie you like to watch, Netflix is also now trying to fine-tune it and say is this the right time/location where you would generally watch a movie, and they might even show a movie title that grabs your attention.
3. Build smarter products
The third area where AI can be used is in products. AI makes our products smarter, intelligent, and simpler to use. We can see AI in products like TV, watches, cars, and so on. If our prediction goes correct, we will soon have AI behind most of our products than we can imagine. We can see AI with toothbrushes that use sensors to see how well we brush our teeth. We are already seeing cars that have the ability to drive by themselves. There are prototypes of fridges that understand what items are stored in them and then analyze them to make meal recommendations. Yoga mats with AI give feedback on your yoga positions. Right now, any product that does not harness Artificial intelligence in the market, will find it difficult to compete with its peers.
4. Streamline business process
Another area where AI can be used in the business is to automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes. We can harness AI to do the work for us. We have worked with several clients across the industry where the clients have saved up to 90% of their work time on some processes. If you have seen iPhone factories most of them are automated. Not just Apple, but several mid-size supply chain companies have automated their production plants too. One of the recent automation we did was for a call center company. We used AI’s voice recognition capability to identify previous callers and provide them the details or personalized services based on their previous data or interactions. There are many such use cases that we have already worked on where AI has helped them. We can see a growing trend where companies are adopting future technologies like AI and ML, more and more. Companies need smarter services, intelligent products, quicker operations, and better decisions. The future technologies are growing and the need as well.
Hopefully, this has given you hindsight on the business applications of Artificial intelligence and where it is heading. If you are looking for any such implementation or have any questions about it, please reach out to us at info@ankercloud.com. We will be sure to help you out.
*source — Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide
