The application of artificial intelligence (AI) may seem to many small business owners to be a daunting undertaking. It’s tempting to dismiss AI as a sophisticated and rather foreign technology that can only be used and understood by computer scientists and other professionals at major tech firms, but this approach is erroneous. In actuality, there are several ways small firms may take advantage of AI right now. And they shouldn’t wait – their rivals definitely won’t.
While it’s frequently mythologized in popular culture and viewed as a particularly destructive economic force, AI is a lot like any other technology. As more and more organizations have created AI applications, competition and adoption rates have grown, driving down prices and making AI accessible to a far larger spectrum of industries. Small firms account for more than half of net employment growth and more than 40 percent of GDP in the United States. The creators of AI solutions want their goods to be accessible to the entrepreneurs who power this vast engine of economic activity.
As AI grows increasingly popular among organizations of all kinds, it will be all the more crucial for your small company to take advantage of what this revolutionary technology has to offer. Here are five methods to accomplish precisely that.
Use AI for data collecting and analysis
Qualtrics recently performed a survey that collected comments from 250 marketing directors and discovered that 96 percent of respondents anticipate AI to handle repetitive research chores such as data cleansing within five years. Meanwhile, 63 percent say AI will take over statistical analysis within the next decade.
These changes aren’t simply taking place in the marketing business. While AI is crucial for huge firms who have access to astonishing volumes of customer data, it’s also vital for small businesses that wish to draw significant conclusions from relatively modest amounts of information. Advanced methods such as statistical regression analysis used to be unattainable to small firms with limited resources (think the expensive cost of employing an analytics company or full-time data scientists), but AI has made them cheap and intuitive.
When small firms have access to advanced statistical techniques, they may learn more about their consumers and uncover new ones. Again, consider the example of regression analysis, which enables you to find connections between a vast variety of factors and identify how they’re effecting your company. From analyzing what keeps clients coming back to your organization to helping you uncover new market segments, AI is an useful statistical tool.
AI has also made it feasible for tiny firms to acquire a considerable quantity of data in the first place. From sentiment analysis to machine learning algorithms that follow consumer preferences and behaviors (companies like Facebook enable firms of all sizes to utilize chatbots, which depend on machine learning), strong data collection methods are now accessible to organizations big and small.
Hire smarter using AI
Small businesses confront particular obstacles when it comes to locating and attracting outstanding employees. Large organizations have brand recognition, large networks, and more resources to throw at job searchers. They also have specialized, well-equipped HR teams that know how to get quality applicants from first-round interviews through onboarding as swiftly as feasible. How can your tiny firm compete with talent-gobbling machines like these?
AI is a tremendous equalizer in the hiring war. While recruiters used to have to manually comb through vast volumes of resumes and hope for the best, AI has made this process considerably more simplified and broader.
For example, machine learning algorithms may evaluate which former recruiting methods were the most productive, such as where you searched for applicants and how you reached out to them. Other AI apps may learn what forms of communication will appeal to individual applicants, identify good leads in unanticipated places, and advise recruiters about the nuances of a candidate’s work history and his or her suitability for a particular post. These are several ways your recruiting operation may be expanded up to help you compete with much bigger organizations.
Make backend organization more effective using AI
We frequently hear about how AI will take jobs, but it often makes more sense to consider AI as a technology that takes tasks. And many of these duties are on the backend – logistical operations such as basic bookkeeping, scheduling, and other sorts of day-to-day management. Considering the fact that small enterprises have a limited number of workers, the transfer of time-consuming jobs like these to AI is vital to help them utilize their human resource effectively.
In a December 2017 post on Minutehack, the co-founder of inniAccounts, James Poyser, says that his tiny firm has made “significant steps to automate certain parts of bookkeeping” with the aid of AI. When AI is employed for backend processes, it’s also less of an invasion on workers. Poyser is sensitive to this fact: “If people regard AI as a danger to their employment, which it isn’t in our situation, then it’s game over.”
On the other hand, most workers appreciate technology that can get rid of repetitive jobs and free them up to conduct more important work. As the responders to our poll recognize, AI increasingly accomplishes precisely that.
Deploy AI to better service your customers
Companies have never had more options to communicate with their consumers. From the expansion of communication channels online to consumers who want considerably greater interaction than ever before, it has become important for organizations to discover innovative methods to promptly answer their customers’ problems. This is one of the reasons why Gartner expects that a quarter of customer support operations would “integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technologies across interaction channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017.”
According to the Qualtrics poll, “Researchers anticipate that roughly 1 in 4 surveys will be spoken to a digital assistant within 5 years.” These estimates offer us excellent grounds to anticipate AI to play a more major role in communication across sectors in the future years.
Chatbots and other kinds of AI-based communication provide particular advantages for small enterprises. Unlike firms that can afford to maintain 24-hour customer service lines, small businesses can’t hire operators to answer calls or emails whenever they come in. AI-powered Chatbots give support to clients whenever they need it and promptly answer queries from prospective customers, allowing small companies an opportunity to both enhance customer experiences and develop new revenue.
Develop an AI-driven marketing platform
Our poll indicated that 93 percent of marketing researchers say AI provides an opportunity for their sector. From reducing the need for staff to undertake mechanical chores such as data preparation to sophisticated data analysis (which our respondents picked as the top potential AI use), AI is profoundly transforming marketing.
This is just as true for little businesses as it is for the biggest organizations in the world. While small companies used to be confined to whatever advertisements they could afford in local marketplaces, they now have the potential to reach a large audience online. They may leverage AI-based advertising systems that have been established by large firms like Facebook and Google to target particular customers who are receptive to their message. They can gather and analyze customer data from many channels. And they can achieve all of this without an army of salesmen.
