Artificial intelligence (AI) is a buzzword that most business owners have already heard of, even if they haven't researched the technology deeply. AI has the potential to change the face of business in fundamental ways. Because of its innate flexibility, AI presents a wide range of potential applications that almost any business can leverage to make itself more efficient.
There are already companies that have started using AI to make their processes more productive and reduce their costs for both material sourcing and labor. Thirteen experts from Forbes Technology Council take a look at how the smartest business owners of today are employing AI and how it helps those businesses succeed at what they do.
1. Targeting Operational Efficiencies
Leaders should initially target operational efficiencies with AI -- those operational areas where the firm has a lot of data. This gives firms the ability to learn, which sets the stage for more advanced AI engineering that can lead to new organizational capabilities. AI is a strategic imperative that leaders must champion in their organizations. - Shawn Harris, zebra.com
2. Analyzing Massive Data Sets
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to learn behaviors and activity based on large sets of data is key for organizations when implementing. Most organizations create errors internally when they do not have access to robust data sets, from chat to IT data. It's important to keep that in mind when implementing a new technology. - Tarek Alaruri, Fairmarkit
3. Making Faster And Better Decisions
The use of AI is extremely over-hyped and in reality we are talking about advanced algorithms and machine learning. The best way to maximize AI and ML is to look at ways you can take large data sets and apply algorithms in order to eliminate needless tasks from your staff. Use this technology to bring information to your teams to help them make better and faster decisions. - Ernie Bray, AutoClaims Direct Inc. (ACD)
4. Offering AI-Powered Insights For Marketing Teams
From the small business owner to the in-house growth lead, AI is proving to be extremely useful when it comes to collecting meaningful, channel-specific marketing insights. From Google Analytics to Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence-enhanced tools are helping marketers be more efficient, spend less time sifting through columns and rows, and spend more time optimizing for performance. - Dawson Whitfield, Looka (formerly Logojoy)
5. Revolutionizing Workflows
The power of AI can revolutionize workflows. This technology can make a noticeable impact on the back office, from increasing electronic operations to streamlining identification and credentialing. With these developments, companies can transform labor-intense processes across industries. - Charles Aunger, Health2047 - American Medical Association
6. Using Chatbots For Websites And Social Media
It's a good idea to enact the use of chatbots that run on artificial intelligence. It's an easy win for customer engagement by providing around-the-clock responses. - Chalmers Brown, Due
7. Turning Customer Service Into A Competitive Edge
We now live in a relationship economy. Customer service is just as important as product quality and price in consumers' loyalty to a brand. Customers expect quick, personal and convenient support on their channel of choice, and are quick to change their purchasing decisions if their demands are not met. The AI industry has matured at the optimal time to help companies fill this expectation gap. - Puneet Mehta, Netomi
8. Reducing Costs And Improving Customer Experience
There are many practical uses of AI, including bringing intelligence to how systems learn and predict behavior, understand and apply customer or user needs in order to improve experiences, or increase efficiencies. An important entry point to leveraging AI is automation -- there are many repetitive tasks that can be automated by software to drive efficiency and reduce costs. - Pervinder Johar, Blume Global
9. Increasing User Engagement
Artificial intelligence has started to look like computers, in that it is invading all kinds of businesses and touching more lives than ever. One example of better user engagement using AI is to forward users to a relevant page if the user lands on a broken link. By processing data around the incident, like where the user came from, AI can direct them to a related page. - Vikram Joshi, pulsd
10. Automating Analysis
Today you are using analytics tools to understand how your business is doing. However, most of the important decisions you will make in the future are based on unexpected problems and opportunities, which these tools don't capture. AI can help you find these insights in the form of automated business analysis tools which surface these emerging insights for you automatically, making you proactive. - Sean Byrnes, Outlier
11. Automating Skill Assessment
Almost every growing business has a constant need to hire new talented team members. Unfortunately, the number of available candidates tends to be so large that manual evaluation of everyone is practically impossible. The past five years have seen a rise of AI-based automated evaluation solutions, especially in the technical assessment space where automated measurements have become very precise. - Tigran Sloyan, CodeSignal
12. Improving Search And Natural Language Processing
There are many branches of artificial intelligence and most attention now is on the possibilities of machine learning. It's important not to forget that natural language processing is also an important branch of AI. An easy use of natural language processing is hooking up search to your document repositories Check out Microsoft Search integration with Office 365 as an example. - Steve Pao, Hillwork, LLC
13. Enhancing Predictive Analytics Capabilities
Most organizations have decision-making capabilities based on business intelligence (BI) and analytics, using traditional BI technologies which rely primarily on understanding patterns in historical data. These BI capabilities can be enhanced in game changing ways using AI that can "learn" from existing internal and external data sources. Most BI product vendors have already added support for AI-based technologies. - Zia Bhutta, Accelirate Inc.
