5 Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on Businesses
Technological development and business growth always proceed hand in hand.
New inventions find their way to the commercial sphere sooner rather than later. And it doesn’t take long for savvy business owners to jump on the opportunity to improve their operation with state of the art equipment.
Today, we can see this process in action with artificial intelligence. What was once just a philosophical concept is now a product that virtually every business has access to. Why is AI such a big deal in the world of business?
What AI brings to the table is the ability to rapidly analyze complex data in order to find efficient solutions for a variety of problems. AI is what you get when you take the concept of a computer to the next level.
We can see this problem-solving ability in practice in many areas of business, from digital marketing, to process automation, to recruitment. And every year we discover a whole range of new ones as well.
To bring you up to speed with the current state of AI in business, we bring you a list of 5 ways in which AI has made life easier for modern companies.
Fine-tuned Product Recommendations
Many people assume that AI is some esoteric concept with no bearing on their life, and they are wrong.
If you ever bought a product on Amazon, discovered a song on Spotify, or watched a show on Netflix by using their various recommendation features, you’ve interacted with an AI without knowing it.
To understand why this is the case, think about what a used car salesman would do to get a person to buy a car. They would talk to the person in order to discover who they are, what they like, and what kind of cars they owned previously.
An AI does the exact same thing, albeit much faster than any human. Companies such as Amazon employ AIs to analyze vast quantities of customer data to discover patterns in customer behavior. This allows them to make predictions about what each individual customer is likely to buy.
AI-powered product recommendations are therefore the key to streamlining the sales process. Businesses no longer have to guess what each given customer is interested in. Instead, they can leave all the hard guesswork to AI, and simply serve the most optimal recommendations by default.
Digital Marketing Automation
Most schools of economic thought agree that business development is closely linked with automation. By reducing the need for manual labor supervision through automated processes, companies can scale up the production process while keeping costs down.
This principle is applicable in all areas of business, including digital marketing. Before the advent of AI, digital marketing used to involve a lot of tedious busywork. Individual pieces of the email had to be tailored for each recipient, ads had to placed manually on websites, and the timing of each social media post had to be determined through careful analysis.
AI has changed all of this in a big way. AI-powered marketing tools gave businesses the ability to automate key aspects of digital marketing. Such tools can automatically determine the most cost-efficient ad placements, email headings with the biggest conversion potential, keywords with the highest organic reach, and more.
In a more practical sense, these tools have helped marketers focus on more creative aspects of digital marketing. Some experts have even predicted that digital marketing will become fully automatic as AI technology continues to develop in the future.
AI-assisted Content Generation
Content is still one of the main reasons people surf the web. This makes content production an integral component of business success in the modern age. However, creating quality content at scale is one of the toughest business challenges out there.
Fortunately, recent developments in an area of AI research called natural language processing (NLP) have opened the doors to AI-assisted content generation.
Content generation is a notoriously difficult problem for AIs to solve. There is a lot of nuance, ambiguity, and practical know-how in the way we speak and write, and no piece of AI software was up to the task until recently.
Thanks to the development of complex deep learning algorithms, modern AIs can produce pieces of content that are indistinguishable from content written by humans. This feature is currently limited to producing formal and technical documents such as reports, product specifications, summaries, and the like. But the potential is already there.
Businesses that utilize AI-assisted content generation can keep content production costs down while maintaining a high quality of output. And as content proliferates around the web, AIs will gain access to more and more training data as time goes, which will enable them to create more convincing content in the future.
Smarter Customer Service Chatbots
Competition is at an all-time high in the world of commerce. Companies around the globe are using the web to attract customers and earn their favor, and the key factor to their success is customer service. Meeting and communicating with customers on their own terms is no longer optional, it is the necessity of doing business.
Customer service is difficult to get right, especially for small businesses that have limited resources and staff. Every customer counts, but it is unfeasible to talk to everyone in person.
Enter chatbots. These automated conversation systems lie at the forefront of modern customer service. Their ability to interact with multiple customers at once, no matter when they call or what issue they have, is crucial for providing a positive customer experience.
The next step in the evolution of chatbots is AI. By hooking a chatbot to an AI capable of improving itself through machine learning, businesses can expand their customer service departments with intelligent digital assistants, allowing them to implement more effective chatbot strategies.
Such AI-powered chatbots can dynamically adjust their output to suit each individual customer. Some customers even seem to prefer chatbots over live customer service reps.
Cybersecurity and Fraud Detection
Business and technology don’t always go hand in hand. Technology is neutral in itself, which means that it can be used for nefarious purposes as well. According to Accenture, companies stand to lose a staggering $5.2 trillion to various forms of cyber-crime, including fraud.
To combat this issue, businesses are increasingly turning to emergent technologies such as AI. Only an AI has the capacity to combat multi-pronged attacks that are becoming worryingly common due to various botnets.
One of the areas where AI is found to excel is fraud detection. Thanks to their data-crunching capabilities, AI can analyze countless b2c and b2b interactions to find the most suspicious ones.
For instance, Amazon utilizes a machine-learning algorithm to detect fake product reviews on their site. These reviews represent blatant attempts to game the review system in favor of certain companies.
Banks use another form of fraud detection to discover fraudulent transactions. This allows them to better protect their customers from phishing, spear phishing, and whaling attacks online.
AI Development and Business Growth
Artificial intelligence is poised to change the world of business as we know it. Businesses across all industries will transform their core workflows, business models, and strategies to take advantage of this powerful new tech. The transition will be far from seamless, and the sooner you start implementing AI, the better position you will be on the marketplace of the future.
