How can AI help you to improve your business?
There has been a lot of hype in the media lately about AI but for many, it is just that, hype.
No one is really explaining how Artificial Intelligence can help smaller businesses or organisations, with the majority focussing on larger corporations and how they can use it, widening the gap between smaller businesses and larger businesses being able to compete on a level playing field.
Use yes or no to answer the following questions:
- Does your business have to do repetitive tasks regularly?
- Does your business undertake complex work flows with different people having to do different tasks to get things done?
- Does someone have to spend time doing invoices or paying bills?
- Does your business provide your customers with online or telephone support?
- Is there something that ties you up in circles that you could teach someone else to?
- Does someone spend time doing data entry?
- Does it take time to sort out email and action or file it in folders?
- Do you have to write proposals, content or copy for publication?
If you have answered yes to any of these questions then AI could easily benefit your business or organisation.
What is more, AI is not that expensive, it is a fraction of the cost of employing someone. How much is someone's time worth and is the best use of that cost spent doing mundane, repetitive tasks?
What if you could free up people so they could do more things that are more valuable but just don't have the time to do it? Artificial intelligence is a means to achieve this, to free up staff from the mundane to enable them to dramatically increase their productivity in more profitable tasks.
It is like increasing your headcount without increasing your wage bill.
AI tools are just that, tools, that can be trained to do tasks in the business, repetitive tasks that tie up staff. Training AI is very easy, you only need to show it how to do something once and it remembers, it also learns so if you need it to apply some intelligence on how to do things, it can make decisions based on the rules you provide it with. You can also provide it with additional steps if it cannot work out what to do.
Here is a simple example. Someone has to go through a mailbox and process all of email and determine what to do with each email based on the content. Some emails may be orders, some may be support requests, some may be sales pitches. AI can read the content and based on the set of rules you give AI, it can then process these emails. The more defined the rules, the more accurately it can action the emails.
You might have rules that tell AI to forward sales requests to the sales team, to forward invoices to finance, to open a support ticket for each support request in the helpdesk system.
There are a lot of different AI tools available to businesses to use in all areas of the business or organisation, from providing 24/7 chat on websites, to automating processes and complex work flows within the business.
At the end of the day AI won't take over many jobs, but the differentiator will be those who use it to compliment their business, getting more productivity with fewer resources, and those that are left behind.
If you would like to see AI in action, call us on 01722 411 999 for a demonstration of how AI can build and process complex workflows within your business or organisation.