Every day, regardless of the industry, business becomes increasingly competitive. In order to emerge successful over the long term, companies must find solutions leveraging existing technologies so that they can gain a significant advantage, along with the favour of their target audiences.
In this regard, artificial intelligence or AI can serve as that all-important solution for adapting, innovating and reimagining business processes to attain transformation and success.
In general, AI is any technology designed to simulate human cognitive functions and intelligence. AI-powered machines can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence such as decision-making, problem-solving, reasoning, and learning.
How would AI technology from a trusted artificial intelligence service help businesses innovate, enhance processes, perform better, and provide what their customers need?
What Is AI in Business?
In the business setting, AI serves as a valuable tool that revolutionises the way companies approach crucial areas like customer engagement and marketing. That's because AI can focus on specific customer groups and accurately segment behaviours while identifying customer needs.
In addition, AI can support the human workforce with their workloads. The technology can generate content, process and analyse vast amounts of data in a shorter time, automate repetitive tasks and optimise business functions (consequently boosting employee productivity), and reduce the risk of human error. AI is also capable of strengthening cybersecurity practices, and driving business value overall.
Artificial intelligence has specific functionalities that can help transform how businesses operate:
Machine Learning
In the process of machine learning, algorithms work to analyse available data, identify patterns and, based on the results, make accurate predictions. This provides business owners with valuable insights that can guide them in making important decisions.
Deep Learning for AI Automation
While machine learning can independently use algorithms and learn from data, it still requires human assistance to correct errors. On the other hand, deep learning makes use of neural networks to learn from data patterns and adapt to new ones with little to no human intervention. It can also perform more complex data analysis processes and tasks such as speech and image recognition.
NLP and Sentiment Analysis
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis make it possible for companies to interpret human language. This is helpful in understanding social media content, analysing feedback from customers, and comprehending other kinds of textual data. It can also generate reports by automation.
NER and Semantic Search
NER stands for Named Entity Recognition and is responsible for identifying the entities pinpointed by machine learning as essential to companies. These include brand names, famous individuals, key geographic locations and more.
Semantic search is crucial in providing context for better understanding of a user's query input.
Using NER and semantic search together makes it possible to process large amounts of unstructured data and information to improve search accuracy, enable data processing automation, and arrive at meaningful insights so business owners can make informed decisions and strategies.
Computer Vision
This subset of AI enables computer systems to extract information from visual inputs like videos and digital images. Here, AI uses both machine learning and deep learning algorithms to learn about key digital imagery elements.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Business
How can artificial intelligence technology prove to be an asset for companies across various industries?
It increases automation, and thus productivity and efficiency of business processes.
Many business tasks that require repetition such as taking meeting notes, entering data, and generating and editing content can now be accomplished by AI tools. This frees up time and opportunities for employees to focus on other responsibilities.
It offers valuable data analysis and insights that allow businesses to enhance decision-making.
Because it can process large volumes of data (both current and historical) at impressive speeds, capture crucial insights and offer forecasts of potential behaviours and trends, AI helps businesses build better strategies for developing products, engaging customers, growing the company and more.
It helps businesses enjoy increased cost savings.
Thanks to increased employee productivity and operational efficiency brought about by automation of routine tasks, employees are encouraged to focus on initiatives that could give the company's competitive edge a significant boost. In addition, having more streamlined workflows means maintenance and inventory management can also be optimised, which can bring down business expenses. Lastly, businesses can reduce energy consumption in facilities and lower their overall environmental impact.
It encourages innovative operations.
The use of AI can inspire businesses to look for even more ways to think outside of the box. The available solutions can pave the way for new and different ideas for developing products, optimising operations and addressing customer needs and wants.
It improves customer experience and engagement.
AI transforms the way businesses interact with their target audience. Using chatbots and other AI-powered assistants ensures customers are always attended to, and in a variety of methods that can be convenient and especially useful for specific scenarios.
AI Applications in Business
Here are some examples of how artificial intelligence is used in business:
Marketing and Sales
Marketing teams work with customer data to identify how target markets spend on brands and how they respond to trends. AI can process big data sets to predict future trends, forecast new spending patterns, and perform competitor analysis. More strategic marketing campaigns can thus be created, and sales teams can use AI to analyse the same customer data to make insightful product recommendations.
Customer Service
AI enables businesses to provide enhanced (meaning more optimised and personalised) customer support. By analysing customer data and interaction history, teams can have a clearer understanding of customer behaviours and preferences. Ticketing processes can be automated for faster response and an improved customer experience.
Fraud Detection and Security
Workplaces are at risk of falling victim to security breaches. Cybersecurity and IT infrastructure protection is another area where AI tools can help. By processing massive amounts of data, AI can spot unusual patterns, suspicious activities and potential threats, and can thus improve network security as well as fraud and anomaly detection, and prevent data breaches. Companies will be able to identify security risks and areas of vulnerability, and thus successfully analyse risk and improve their response to future threats.
Product Development
With the help of AI, businesses can create more customer-driven products that go beyond traditional design. Using AI prompts, for example, product designers can study historical data and customer feedback as well as analyse market trends to understand their target market's current and potential future needs. This provides an opportunity for companies to innovate and ensure that all products are relevant and valuable.
Supply Chain Management
Predictive analytics is a form of AI that makes supply chain management easier – it provides pricing forecasts of material and shipping costs. This helps businesses avoid overstocking of products or bottlenecks throughout the chain.
Harnessing the Power of AI in Business
Artificial intelligence presents countless possibilities for enhancing capabilities and supporting operations, efficiency, productivity growth and savings for businesses. Talk to our systems integration solutions experts today about how we can help introduce this innovation to your company.
