“People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.”
Peter Thiel
AI was proposed in 1956 to allow machines to work in tandem with each other to learn, comprehend and act to help humans. Since then till 2011, their adoption into the was a slow process mainly due to technical limitations. Recently however, AI has graduated from gaming engines to various other areas of human activity and with applications in numerous industries. It is expected to be the most disruptive technology by some over the next five years.
Businesses are using AI in the following manner:
A personalised ecommerce experience
A majority of our ecommerce interactions are becoming machine centric with no human interaction, which is expected to rise in the near future. Even the generally and completely human activities of voice calls, chats, social media replies and email correspondences are quickly turning into automated that replicate all sorts of human functions.
AI does so by quickly identifying the behaviour of the customer, their past credit checks and other such common threads to provide them with better choices of product worth their spending power. artificial intelligence also analyses millions of transactions and provides a personalised experience to each customer in the form of targeted offers. AI also helps track potential customers and successfully retargets them to make them move further along the sales process without wasting any time.
Social media integration with AI into the CRM of a business helps to customise the product or solution and provide a suitably personalised sales message to each customer just on time to boost sales
Smarter business decisions
With the help of AI, it has become easier to form useful insights into massive sets of data which earlier used to be a time consuming and complicated work. Integration of CRM with AI has allowed exponential access to customer data that can be used to make timely business decisions that focus on customers and provide the best possible offers in a time bound fashion. AI is also being used to identify potential leads and opportunities which were earlier mostly a hidden domain for future growth.
Anticipate the outcomes and streamline
AI being a machine captures the signals that are often missed by the humans looking for correlations in data. artificial intelligence tools can predict based on a recent interaction, the views of the customer that can help build a stronger relationship with the customer and ensure stronger brand recognition by providing quality services.
AI also can help predict that customers might have a negative feeling towards a service or product and immediate steps to change such perceptions can be taken to smoothen the process. This anticipation of the problem areas helps businesses to focus on the customer and align them to their needs in a better and timely manner.
Minimise mundane tasks
All of the repetitive tasks can be automated that leaves resources to focus on tasks that add value to the business thus driving efficiency. This is especially crucial for small businesses who have a limited set of resources which can better serve in areas that boost sales rather than routing queries or logging notes
Although it is still slightly difficult to predict the exact use of AI that businesses will employ as their application is immense and mostly their use is restricted by a fear of the unknown. AI combined with deep learning can easily remove the daily business tasks that take up a huge amount of time of the humans and align them towards business growth.
Such businesses who switch over the AI sooner will surely have the first mover benefits more than the rest. Though, the first step for the implementation of AI to any business should be to identify the opportunities and create a list of short term business strategies before implementing the entire range of solutions to reap better benefits.
I’d rather see artificial intelligence than no intelligence