If businesses want to thrive and be successful, they must implement Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although it may seem quiet obviously that every business needs technology, you must find unique ways to stand out against your competitors. Investing in the right type of changes can make a real difference to your success. We spoke exclusively to a wide range of business owners and senior leaders to find out what they have done and ask their suggestions on ways your business can implement automation leading to your overall success and productivity.
AI in Customer Service
“Automated customer service can help support team productivity for customer service teams. The AI can be programmed to answer basic questions that don’t need a customer service representative to be online. If the question is more complex the customer can be connected to an agent who will assist them with their issue. It’s important to provide quality customer service, but it’s equally important to provide quick answers. Customers expect a response from customer service in less than 24 hours, so AI can help improve the productivity of the customer success team.”
-Rich Rudzinski, Founder and Technical Strategist for Oversight.co, Tragic Media, and Drivey.com
Let AI do the Annoying Tasks
“Most people have dealt with data entry in their life and understand that it can be a very tedious task. Luckily implementing AI can help greatly with a lot of tedious tasks. Nowadays, AI can help organise data fields, analyse the data, and coordinate it in the way you wish it to be. Most of the time, AI will do these tasks more accurately than a human. Using AI to analyse which sales tactics work the best seems like a great way to improve sales as well. There are so many methods in which AI can improve a business and take some workload off employees. The best way to start would be using AI to complete repetitive and tedious tasks, and then as time goes on, continue to implement it in other areas.”
– Himanshu Agarwal, SVP of Solutions at WorkBoard
Using AI in Marketing
“AI can be implemented in business by using it in marketing to improve operational efficiency. By using AI in marketing, marketers can better understand their target consumers. The data can then be used to increase conversions and ultimately reduce marketers’ workloads to put their time into other needed areas. AI algorithms can also help personalise users’ website experience, such as demographics, device interaction, and more similar features. These tactics can then aid in displaying relevant offers and content to the user through intelligent personalisation. Image recognition, SEO optimisation, and push notifications are among the other ways AI can aid in helping businesses with their marketing strategies.”
-Jason Brandt, Customer Success Director at Podopolo
Let AI Pick the Price
“One way that Artificial Intelligence can be helpful to any business is through pricing optimisation tools. AI can look at thousands of data sets, compare pricing models, and help you come up with the ideal price to sell products. AI can also look at various factors such as your brand’s reputation, product quality, and cost of operations. A lot of large companies use this type of AI to fluctuate/adjust prices based on trends, current events, and demand.”
– Sam Rogers, Outreach Manager at Ziebart
Conducting Competitive Intelligence
“Conducting competitive intelligence through research and analysis is a great way to implement AI into your business. Competitive intelligence is the process of collecting and analysing information about current and possible future competitors by tracking everything your competitors do and evaluating how to outdo their next steps and make informed decisions. By incorporating AI in your competitive intelligence research, you can capture complete information about your competitors’ every move and understand why competitors’ sites are ranking higher than yours. This way, marketers can make decisions that can have a positive impact on their business and help them jump ahead of their competitors.”
-Megan Jones, Community Outreach Manager at NutraSweet Natural
AI for Cybersecurity
“Utilise Artificial Intelligence to improve your company’s cybersecurity. AI can look out for suspicious activity, decide which threats are legit or spam, and save your IT team time. This type of AI is commonly used in email inboxes to detect when spam messages are coming through and is a great tool to use on a company-wide scale too. For example, this type of integration will filter through your emails and automatically put the spam ones away and the focused ones in your inbox. Also, if you receive an email from an outside source, it will have a pop-up saying it’s ‘phishy’ or ask if you trust content from this site, further eliminating your risk of opening spam. Keep your company network secure with the help of Artificial Intelligence!”
– Tom Mumford, Co-Founder of Undergrads LLC
Automate Accounting Tasks
“One of the greatest things about implementing AI into your business is it takes over tedious tasks as well as removes human error from the equation. Using AI in your accounting department can automate repetitive tasks like imputing data, categorising transactions, evaluating expense reports, and gathering changes in data. Accountants are expected to work with a high degree of accuracy, timeliness, and consistency. Even with the best accountants, errors in these processes are inevitable. AI can increase output by minimising this error and allowing your team to focus their time and effort on other tasks. This can be especially valuable for companies with more complex processes and operations.”
– Jeffery Pitrak, Marketing and Account Manager at Transient Specialists
Automating Lead Communication
“We have access to numerous AI tools that can increase our businesses’ conversion rates. Automated emails can be crucial for an online store because an ‘abandoned cart’ reminder can be the difference between a lead and a conversion. They’re also a great way to keep in touch with previous customers and existing business relationships. If your business has an app they can also ping their customers if they have closed their app. For example, let’s say someone was using your app to online shop, has their cart full ready to check out, but closes the app. You can set an AI function to ping your customers, saying, ‘An item in your bag is nearly out of stock’ or ‘Did you forget about your items?’ Using these notifications will help your customers stay alert and potentially purchase from you.
– Kevin Mako, President and Founder of Mako Design + Invent
Seamless Finance reports
“Utilising AI can save companies tremendous amounts of time on financial reports. Calculating every expense and stream of revenue for a large company can be time-consuming, and adequately documenting everything leaves little room for error. Artificial Intelligence can help take the burden of expense reporting from C-Suite executives and their employees. Let’s face it, when it comes to money, you do not want to be wrong, and oftentimes errors can be made when someone is making financial reports. With the help of automation, all you need to ensure is the format and functionality are correct, and bam, your reports will be accurate and ready to go.”
– William Armitge Co-Founder of BestOdds
AI for Human Resources
“There is a larger emphasis on virtual recruiting and hiring due to remote and hybrid workplaces, leading to an expansion in the candidate pool. Utilising HR to help with the growth of virtual recruitment is crucial in staying on top of the recruitment process. Most organisations use AI to look through a candidate’s resume and LinkedIn profiles for their previous work experiences and qualifications to see if they are a good fit for the position or if they would be better suited for another role at the company. AI also can help build networks within and outside of an organisation to ensure that business relationships can be maintained and healthy.”
– Jacob Dayan, CEO of Community Tax
Use AI and BI Solutions for Tough Decision-Making
“Using AI to augment data and analytics capabilities is a great strategy when it comes to having to make tough decisions regarding finances, product continuation, buying supplies and resources, and much more. Augmented analytics means applying powerful machine learning algorithms to explore more data and let AI make accurate inferences instead of doing guesswork. Intelligent tools help businesses retrieve automated insights and eliminate personal biases. An example of a large business that uses this method is Walmart, as the corporation processes massive volumes of transaction records with the help of BI. Even General Electric owns a successful predictive maintenance strategy by allowing AI to handle the historical data on equipment, which has shown to be effective.”
-James Burati, SVP of Sales and Marketing at 1-800-Pack-Rat
Save on Energy Expenses with AI
“One expense that routinely goes under the radar is electricity bills, but they can quickly balloon in price without proper oversight. While this may have been a difficult task due to the need for constant oversight from individuals, artificial intelligence provides several ways to create a more energy-efficient workplace. In many workplaces, the air conditioning is left on 24/7 without accounting for the actual weather conditions that day. An automated system that considers historical and current climate data to intelligently control the internal climate inside the building will reduce unnecessary electricity expenses. Additionally, AI can be used to determine which aspects of your business don’t require electricity at that moment and shut them off until they’re needed again to reduce energy costs further.”
– Kate Lipman, Sales & Marketing Consultant at embrace Scar Therapy
Using AI as a Personal Assistant
“People in C-suite positions are incredibly busy, and activities such as meetings and travel make up a large portion of their time at the company. Traditional manual bookkeeping always carries the risk of human error, leading to unintentional overlaps and hasty last-minute changes to the schedule in an attempt to rectify a mistake after it’s become a real problem. However, with modern technology, those instances of lost productivity resulting from human error are all but a thing of the past. Digital assistants can process information about scheduled meetings and planned travels far more quickly than a human would have been capable of. Additionally, they can immediately detect any conflicts well before they occur and alert you of them, allowing you to correct them before they become a problem.”
– Bill Lyons, CEO at Griffin Funding
Using Data Analysis
AI can be used to retrieve large data sets within a matter of seconds and translate that information into a more easily digestible format for humans to analyse. It can be used best for developing more innovative pricing strategies, highlighting where costs can be reduced and uncovers inefficiencies. You should use AI to gather insight based on a customer’s preferences. With the help of AI, you will be a step ahead of your customers and their purchases. This is super helpful when identifying the different patterns that your data shows. These insights can be used to help the business, and the employees make better-informed decisions.
– Sacha Ferrandi, CEO and Co-founder at Source Capital
Qualifying Targeted Leads More Accurately
Technology has made it easier to connect with people and corporations on a business and personal level. Yet, popular sites have millions of users, so finding information alone is time-consuming. Using AI to help gather data on leads in your industry is an accurate and quick way to increase marketing and productivity. AI tracks clients’ habits and purchases, which allows the system to predict what each user would like to buy.
AI knows what to sell because it follows the customers closely. It makes a huge difference when you get suitable ads in front of the right people. One example is if you were having a conversation with a friend over a brand of jeans, and later on, you get ads about those same jeans; that is the power of AI. No, they do not listen to your conversations, but some tools will track what you search in google or their app so they can accurately target their products to you.”
– Daniel Kane, Founder at Ridge
Social Media
“Social media has quickly become one of the most important ways for organisations to increase their reach and connect with customers online. Many tools utilise artificial intelligence to hone the best pitches and advertisements to reach the most users and convert the most customers. These AI systems analyse your customer base’s purchasing preferences and behavioral patterns to use the most effective language in their strategies. There are also AI platforms that can analyse your picture and video media as well to see how effective they can be at driving engagement and traffic. Implementing AI into your social media is a must because the tools can do social listening and social monitoring to gather data on your consumers so you can precisely target them.”
– Brandon Brown, CEO of GRIN
Filtering Through Customer Interactions Online
“One of the most useful methods to use AI in the business world is filtering through customer questions and comments to find the most urgent responses that need to be addressed. Artificial intelligence has gotten so advanced that it can recognise when a customer has an important, time-sensitive question. It can also understand when a customer is most interested in your product or service and convert it into a sale. This is commonly seen in chatbots and the FAQ section, automation can detect when a customer needs to speak to a person and can automatically direct them. This kind of tool is invaluable for any sales team that is looking to utilise their many different channels of communication to customers online into high-quality leads.”
– Joe Spector, Founder and CEO of Dutch
Use Recommender Systems To Help Win Customer Loyalty
“Accurate recommendations from AI systems is what you need to personalise your content and offers. Such components of a successful business as customer experience, online strategy, mobile strategy, and marketing can get extra value from custom recommender systems. Such systems work based on big data. AI analyses massive amounts of data, efficiently adapts itself to a specific digital environment, and takes over the work of human employees in identifying market current trends and tendencies. Using AI helps save time and resources, takes routine off employees’ shoulders, and enables human talents to do more sophisticated or human-based tasks. Industry giants like Amazon and Netflix use recommender engines to offer consumers exactly what they want based on personal, campaign, or historical data. That helps them win new audiences and promote services. As evidence of their choice, SAS reports that a well-balanced recommender system may increase sales by up to 20%.”
-Jonathan Finegoldi, Sr. e-Commerce Manager at MedCline
Developing Accurate Business Forecasts
“Regardless of the industry, all companies require proper planning and development. By utilising AI technologies, a company can generate business forecasting models with greater accuracy. Without AI, companies have to manually enter data but are incapable of accounting for the thousands of different variables. These traditional methods often lead to lackluster predictions that do not hold up in the modern world. Not only is AI capable of equating all of the different metrics at once, but it can simultaneously incorporate changing data in real time. As a result, business predictions, such as growth and demand forecasts, are more easily and precisely created.”
-David Ring – Senior Marketing Manager at MCT – Trading
Eco-Friendly AI Techniques
“With the everchanging results of technology, one excellent benefit of AI is their ability to be eco-friendly and sustainable. This can be used in several ways, from agricultural change to online shopping. To start, AI can be used in the agricultural department by accurately measuring the amount of food, fertilizer, and other raw materials needed, leading to increased efficiency and fewer materials going to waste. In comparison, if you are selling products online, AI can ensure you are using the necessary amount of fabric. With the help of AI to reduce human error, projects can be done quickly and ensure they are not overspending on products or materials to sell. Not to mention if your brand is already eco-conscious, you are significantly reducing your carbon output.”
-Adrian Pereira, Co-Founder and CEO of ecopeaco.com
Build a Data-Driven Culture in Business
“When a business decides they want to create a data-driven culture, the decision must be accompanied by research and numbers to back-up the initiative. Once it has been proven that data does indeed work, the business will then need to create trainings so that their employees can become data literate. This may involve hiring data professionals as well to ensure success. The next step is finding a secure data platform to get real-time data from and also securely store in. Seeing the plan on a data platform helps to confirm the plan’s lifespan and that it will give your business the competitive advantage it needs to get to market faster.”
-Adrien Dissous, Global SVP of Marketing at babo Botanicals
Whether you are starting small and using chatbots or taking a unique approach to saving energy, AI can be used in many ways. Through marketing automation, analytics, and customer loyalty, your business is sure to succeed. Remember to start small and gradually build your way into AI; from there, your achievements will skyrocket.
Designed to meet the demands of modern industry, IoSCM’s Intelligence 4.0 is a range of bite-size courses providing expert insight into the hottest topics and major developments from across the supply chain.
THE CHALLENGE
Since it was first established, the Supply Chain has been an ever changing and evolving landscape. When we look back over the history of Supply Chain Management, there are so many events and developments which have shaped the industry to the modern power house it is today. For many Supply Chain professionals the biggest challenge today is to understand the new “lingo” and the latest “buzzwords” that seem to be taking the Supply Chain by storm. In recent times, the change in customer demand and buying patterns have caused a ripple effect across the Industry, with every corner of the Supply Chain being revolutionised by advances in technology.
THE SOLUTION
Keeping up with the newest trends can seem like a full time job. For Professionals who already have busy work schedules, finding time to understand these key changes can be a daunting task. Don’t worry, IoSCM are on hand to teach you all you need to know about the modern Supply Chain. We are therefore delighted to introduce INTELLIGENCE 4.0. A comprehensive collection of brand new online short courses providing expert insight into the latest major developments from across the industry. Each course has been written by an Industry Expert, using their in-depth understanding and practical knowledge to teach you everything you need to know about the newest and largest developments within the Supply Chain.
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence bite-size course, part of the Intelligence 4.0 Range of Courses.
Artificial Intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, is a fascinating subject and has a huge variety of applications. This course will enlighten you in key areas of this interesting subject, from understanding how AI is impacting the future of the Supply Chain to looking at the risk involved with AI. Learn how AI is affecting areas from industry to financial services and form your own opinion on the benefits and influence of Artificial Intelligence.