Artificial intelligence aims to understand, comprehend, and take augmented actions with human-like intelligence to make business processes cost-effective and efficient. Wide-scale investments in AI technology have allowed businesses across industries to integrate AI into their businesses. In the last four years alone, the number of businesses integrating AI increased by 270%. It highlights how important this disruptive technology will become in the future.
5 Ways how Using Artificial Intelligence can be Beneficial for your small business
Here are some benefits of using AI in your small business:
1) Smart Logistics
For businesses dealing in consumer products, it is a challenging task to organize invoices, dispatch products, and maintain adequate inventory levels. A shortfall in any of these activities could mean a loss of revenue. Artificial intelligence in logistics brings machines with advanced learning capabilities that can help you synchronize these activities and manage your supply chain more efficiently. For example, automation is helping businesses to provide features like real-time location tracking and facilitate returns for customers. This provides a better customer experience.
2) Eliminates redundant manual tasks
Integrating artificial intelligence in your business can boost the productivity of your sales team. There are several tools to provide assistance to tackle back-end sales processes. Using them you can eliminate the need to manually perform tasks like scheduling meetings, forecasting sales, sending emails, evaluating quotes, and others. This will allow your team to focus on what matters the most – growing revenue.
3) Expand your team
Small businesses have financial constraints that prevent them from expanding their team. Hiring manpower can become expensive and this is where AI technologies like virtual assistants and chatbots solve the problem. While visiting websites, you must have come across pop-up windows that provide assistance in shopping or browsing the website. They are chatbots working just like an employee at a retail store that is helping the business assist their customers. You can integrate this on your website or mobile applications to help more customers, without having to hire significant manpower.
4) AI to understand your customers
In a virtual world where in-person interaction is negligible, it becomes difficult for businesses to keep track of customer behavior. This is where AI helps you to track and analyze the behavior of the customers on your website. They automatically capture customer browsing patterns to display personalized content on the customer’s screen. From providing recommendations on related blog posts to product suggestions, data, and business intelligence pushes content that the customer has higher chances of engaging with.
5) Human Resource Management
Along with artificial Intelligence, your business also needs human intelligence or manpower to operate the business processes. Many small businesses do not have dedicated HR teams which makes it difficult to find the right candidate. AI tools can help to screen hundreds of applications to shortlist the most promising individuals. This allows you to spend more time interviewing them and understand if they can add value to your business’s growth.
Summing it Up
The Covid-19 pandemic has made further aggravated the need of implementing AI in business. This has been most evident in the retail industry which has been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. More businesses are using AI in retail to expand their reach and improve customer experience. and going forward, more businesses across different industries will adopt AI to gain competitive advantages.