Benefits of Artificial Intelligence for Business
Artificial intelligence isn’t a new concept.
As a matter of fact, it has been around ever since the 1950s and a workshop at the Dartmouth College at which the field of AI research was established.
Although many people still think of AI from the perspective of humanoid sentient robots with a mind of their own, the truth is that much of this technology still revolves around its capability to make use of huge volumes of data.
And that’s exactly what businesses can benefit from.
Automating Business Processes
There’s a plethora of different simple, repetitive, and mundane business tasks that still have to be done.
Automation is a solution whose benefits are cost reduction, improved performance, reliability, eliminating human error, and availability.
In other words, by implementing AI-powered automation, businesses can completely transform their production lines, quality control, storage management, speed up their supply chain, as well as facilitate orders, payments, and customer support, among many other things.
For example, collaborative robots or cobots have disrupted the manufacturing industry.
These intelligent machines work side by side with humans in order to optimize different manufacturing processes. They can be easily set up and programmed, as well as safe to operate with. Cobots pick up the slack and do the dirty, unsafe, or boring jobs instead of people.
According to an analysis, Amazon managed to reduce its operating expenses by 20% with the help of Kiva Robots.
Improving Customer Experience
With the advancement of different technologies, customers have become increasingly demanding and they won’t settle for average service or product quality.
As a result of this, customer experience is the new currency, and 88% of companies make it a priority.
But it’s hard to set the bar high in this respect by leveraging only the human workforce.
Cobots’ office counterparts, chatbots, don’t do the heavy lifting, but are equally impressive in terms of efficiency, cutting costs, and performance.
These smart algorithms can take over customer support and significantly improve customer satisfaction and experience. Chatbots are available 24/7/365 and they can handle a number of queries simultaneously, thus reducing waiting times.
64% of people say that 24-hour service is the best feature of chatbots, so it’s clear how beneficial these can be for any business.
In other words, businesses that are responsive, never put their customers on hold, and do everything to help and assist them will dominate the market.
However, chatbots have the reputation of delivering predefined, canned phrases and answers. This used to be true a couple of years ago, but the latest state-of-the-art bots are much more sophisticated to the extent that soon it will be impossible to tell the difference between them and human support agents.
Apart from helping customers solve their product issues and providing them answers to different questions, chatbots are also capable of collecting valuable customer information. Paired with the power of big data analytics, they can also process and interpret the unstructured data – something that wasn’t possible in the past – and identify different patterns.
In layman’s terms, AI-powered chatbots can understand your customers’ behavior, their interests, preferences, and needs, and offer them the right solution at the right time.
It’s only logical that a growing number of companies plan on jumping the AI bandwagon and tries to figure out how to create artificial intelligence software that will fit their needs.
Predicting Customer Behavior
Predictable revenue is something that every business should strive for.
There’s no need to throw darts in the dark and rely on chance when predictive analytics can allow making data-driven decisions both in marketing and sales.
With the help of data mining, statistics, and AI, companies are now able to identify the most effective ways of reaching their customers.
Moreover, the lack of alignment between marketing and sales is an extremely costly mistake – that’s how businesses lose $1 trillion annually.
By introducing a lead-scoring system supported by AI, these two departments will be able to collaborate on a deeper level and make the right decisions, thus boosting conversions. This practically means that marketing will more easily identify high-quality, sales-ready leads and forward them to sales. In other words, salespeople will be provided with all the right information necessary to close deals and they won’t have to waste time on those who have no intention of making a purchase.
Offering Personalized Customer Recommendations
The phrase “Customers who bought this product also bought” is familiar to all those who have ever purchased anything on Amazon (and almost any other online store.)
This powerful algorithm is what many businesses use in order to cross-sell and upsell, and stats say that it’s responsible for 35% of Amazon’s revenue.
By analyzing their customers’ buying and spending habits, on-site behavior, and different preferences and interests, AI can help businesses show accurate and relevant product or service suggestions. And unlike humans, AI can process all these vast amounts of customer information at lightning speed thus accelerating the entire sales process.
Every time a customer views a certain product or puts something in the shopping cart, the algorithm records it, and compares these results with those of people who liked similar products. That’s how an entire gamut of different recommendation parameters is created.
It won’t be wrong to say that artificial intelligence is still at its infancy and that the best is yet to come. However, even this scratching the surface has brought numerous benefits to early adopters.
