4 Ways You Can Leverage AI to Boost Your Business
Artificial intelligence has found its way into nearly every aspect of the business pipeline. Now’s the time to do something about it.
When you think of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the first thing that comes to mind might be any number of science fiction books or movies. However, AI isn’t just for the keyboard cowboys of Neil Stephenson’s cyberpunk stories. In fact, AI has enjoyed a dramatic rise in popularity across nearly every sector of business. To put it mildly, AI is everywhere. And businesses that are lagging behind this adoption will eventually find themselves behind a very challenging curve.
Artificial intelligence has found its way into nearly every aspect of the business pipeline. And with AI, your business can enjoy much-improved processes, from supply chains, delivery pipelines, data analysis, and even the client-based apps used by your employees and customers. There is so much AI can do for businesses, that companies across all the business spectrum are reaching out to us at BairesDev to learn the ways your business can leverage AI.
That’s why we thought it’d be a good idea to write this article to explain a little about AI and its potential uses. But before going into the specifics, let’s start with the basics.
What is AI?
AI is any type of software (or a component of an application) capable of engaging in human-like activities such as learning and problem-solving. And just like its human counterpart, the longer AI works at a task, the better it can perform the task. It learns. And the more data you input into a piece of AI-driven software, the more its learning capacity will improve.
The more you feed the machine, the more the machine can learn. The more the machine can learn, the more it can do.
What is machine learning?
Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of AI that enables a piece of software to learn and improve from experience, without having to be specifically programmed to do so. The primary goal of ML is to create applications that can access data and learn on their own.
So you use Artificial Intelligence by rolling Machine Learning into your applications such that they can improve and expand without your intervention.
Companies around the globe are making use of AI and ML. Some are building those applications and systems in-house, while others are going the offshore software outsourcing route to develop the necessary software.
Now that you have a fundamental idea of what AI is, what are the ways your company can leverage AI to boost your business? Let’s find out.
#1 Data analysis
This is, without a doubt, one of the best ways most businesses can leverage AI. You probably make use of massive amounts of data to not only analyze customer habits but predict trends. The problem with this is that it can be a very time-consuming task. This is especially so when the amount of data you must process grows with demand.
To make this even more complicated, you’re not just combing through a single column of spreadsheet data, or a typical relational database, where you can use a standard SQL query to find out what you need to know. Your business might employ numerous types of databases, that include tables or documents with hundreds of thousands of entries — each of which must be compared to one another, in order to draw any useful conclusion.
You can’t expect a human being to handle that task. It would take forever. That’s why you should turn to AI.
With it, tasks of that size and scope can be handled quickly, reliably, and accurately. Even better, you can tune the AI component of your application to learn in a very specific way. Once deployed, AI will work without stopping. So if you want data analysis 24/7365, you’ll want AI for the job.
#2 Chatbots
Chatbots are applications used for online chat conversations that can address customer queries quickly and help solve them. Thanks to AI, they not only can hold human-like conversations, but they can also improve their ability to be more efficient and accurate, with the added bonus that they begin to fool those they are chatting with into thinking they are human.
In fact, AI-driven chatbot Eugene Goostman was the first to reportedly pass the Turing Test (a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human).
But why are chatbots so important to businesses? With these tools, you can offer 24/7 online support. Deploy an AI-powered chatbot to your website and customers can use that chatbot to get answers to questions, without having to wait for office hours.
Although chatbots might not be able to answer every question, they can be used as the first line of communication and, with the help of artificial intelligence, they’ll learn over time to provide better and more sophisticated answers.
#3 CRM and HRM tools
Normally, your staff must manually handle all of the updates that occur within your CRM and HRM tools. This can be tedious, especially when those updates are small and frequent. However, with the help of AI, those tools can auto-update, auto-correct, and improve the connections made between clients, employees, and customers.
This type of AI integration becomes increasingly important as your company grows. You don’t want to have to use a staff of employees just to keep your CRM tools up-to-date — especially when your customers number in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
#4 Mobile technology
Finally, AI has become increasingly important within the realm of mobile technology. Not only does it make it possible for you to roll out mobile applications that can learn from customer behavior, but you could also even create applications that act, based on a customer location.
For example, with the help of AI, you can automatically notify a customer, via their smartphone, of a sale the second they walk into your business. This type of feature can be used as an incentive to install your company app, which gives your business even more routes for success with your customer base.
Conclusion
Once you start working with AI, there’s almost no limit to what you can do. And with outstanding offshore software developers, you can add AI into almost any application created for your company. So what are you waiting for? Hop on to the AI bandwagon now, before you get even further behind the curve.
