Artificial intelligence isn’t going away any time soon; it’s just too useful in too many places. AI can be seamlessly integrated into many aspects of your business, like AI in accounts payable, but not all. If used incorrectly, though, you’ll be harming your business instead of optimizing it. A few of the useful applications for AI in business will be explored below, but many more exist.
No matter which you choose to try and implement, make sure to weigh the pros and cons of adding AI to that process before doing so, or you’ll have a flood of avoidable problems to address in the near future.
Improved Customer Service
You’ve certainly experienced AI in customer service before. It’s that little chatbot that pops up as soon as you show up on a website’s homepage, asking if you have any questions. All you have to do is type into the little textbox they provide and you should get the answers you’re looking for.
These bots can be great for both site visitors and employees for one simple reason: not all inquiries are worth another human’s time. Finding out where to locate a specific topic on the homepage is, getting the answers to simple questions, and more are all important for people to do, but not so much for employees to answer. Chatbots fill this role quite well and have the added benefit of being available 24/7, which your employees simply can not compete with.
However, AI chatbots should not replace your customer service team entirely. Sure, they can handle simple questions, but feedback, complaints, and more complex questions need to be handled by a real person.
Luckily, chatbots typically come with the ability to transfer customer conversations to an employee; you just have to make sure the transfer actually does what it’s supposed to and that you have staff trained and ready to handle such inquiries.
Decreased Tedium
AI can decrease the amount of tedium you and your employees deal with on a daily basis by just automating many repetitive tasks. The biggest task it can help with is probably data entry.
It quickly gets annoying to deal with massive spreadsheets to both input new data and look at old data for reference, or even to locate and correct mistakes. This simple task can easily be completed by AI, freeing up your employees to focus on much more important work.
Just make sure to have a human look over the AI’s work now and then; it’s not perfect, and any mistakes must be corrected as soon as possible to avoid future headaches.
Better Marketing
It may seem strange at first that AI can improve marketing strategies, but it makes sense once you remember that marketing is all about analyzing data and making decisions accordingly.
An AI can quickly review the information you have on a particular customer to push personalized ads that showcase products they may want or need and increase the chances of you making a sale as a result.
They can also make employees’ lives easier by automatically placing ads in the appropriate ad spots on websites and such or even sending out the occasional marketing email. They can even help create sales forecasts by analyzing trends and such.
Honestly, the benefits marketers can get from AI go much deeper than can be explored here, and should be thoroughly researched so you can see exactly how many benefits a marketing AI software could provide.
Increased Cybersecurity
While AI can be used for many things, there are 2 tasks it truly excels at: analyzing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns. This can make it invaluable when used in cybersecurity alongside trained professionals.
Current cybersecurity relies on protecting from known threats and the skills of an entire human cybersecurity team to quickly analyze a lot of data and create countermeasures to new threats.
The problem is that analyzing such vast amounts of data takes time for humans, and this is bad news when you’re under threat from an unknown piece of malicious code.
AI can take this large dataset and analyze it incredibly quickly, sometimes doing so in just a few minutes, which allows security teams to take action much more quickly. AI can even point out vulnerabilities in the current cybersecurity setup, allowing for even more protection.
However, it’s important to stress that AI should never fully replace humans in this task. Both humans and AI can make mistakes, and one can rely on the other to cover and correct these shortcomings before they become a problem if used in tandem.
