How fast do trends in the market advance? Specifically with regards to artificial intelligence. Businesses are taking advantage of artificial intelligence as a breakneck pace. According to a BI Intelligence report, 80% of companies will use AI chatbots by 2020. Here are five advantages artificial intelligence can give your SMEs.
Artificial Intelligence is a trend that makes sense.
Some SMEs fear that AI is an unattainable technology and difficult to apply. Conversely, business intelligence will help SMEs save a lot of time and money.
But what is artificial intelligence, and how does it relate to business? What are the advantages that artificial intelligence can give your SME?
Artificial intelligence and business.
The term artificial intelligence can be used on all tasks that solve human intelligence foibles, and they are solved, quickly, by machines. Tasks such as planning or learning languages, for example, or recognizing objects in photos, people’s voices, and feelings, can be done by AI.
And the truth is that artificial intelligence has a lot of potential. It is hoped that it can help solve very diverse problems ( prevent natural catastrophes, for example), but also that it will generate many other solutions.
Elon Musk is a strong promoter of AI regulation. Musk believes that if AI is not regulated — it can be perilous. A recent example of this could be the GPT-2 text generator, capable of generating fake news that is too credible. Its creators (OpenIA, powered precisely by Musk) saw this generator as a threat more than anything else and decided to censor the full version — fearing the consequences. Thus, artificial intelligence has advantages and disadvantages.
Tasks machines solve
Some examples of artificial intelligence we can find in our daily life: so, when we open Facebook and see the content that appears in the “News” tab, there is a selection in what is shown to each user, and an algorithm makes that selection with artificial intelligence. The same as when Amazon recommends a product or book. Or surely you have seen some content that Netflix suggests to you because you saw another similar one. These examples are from the machines in the form of AI software.
Other examples are easier to see. Emotech’s assistant, Olly, is very similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home, but has a fundamental difference: her personality can evolve — this is AI.
We see that artificial intelligence is linked to business, and companies are taking advantage of artificial intelligence to do their tasks faster and at a lower cost.
AI is one of the most disruptive technologies of the century, and it is helping SMEs to evolve faster, especially in the field of communications, product development, and customer service.
Ways AI can help your business.
The results of a Vistage survey of SME leaders make clear that the benefits of artificial intelligence are becoming very important to the business. 29.5% of those surveyed stated that, of all the new technologies, artificial intelligence is the one that will have the most significant impact on their companies.
So what are the benefits that SMEs can get from using artificial intelligence? The AI advantages are capable of reducing costs, optimizing the use of time, and achieving an increase in results:
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Optimize Human Resources tasks.
One of the areas in which artificial intelligence is advancing is Human Resources. Today, it is possible to take advantage of artificial intelligence to improve personnel selection processes, as well as to receive returns from new employees on the same method (and optimize it).
Among the advantages of using AI in this type of process can be the fact that it can help your company choose between lots of applicants to see precisely which ones match the search criteria. Matching the search criteria not only reduces time and costs but also enhances applicants’ quality and suitability, which, in turn, saves HR time they can spend on other tasks.
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Automate conversations with customers.
A chatbot with artificial intelligence is another of the most common examples in business intelligence. The acquisition of chatbots by companies is, as we saw above, increasingly common and necessary for SMEs, regardless of their size.
One of the most important trends in digital marketing is conversational marketing, which proposes a return to conversations and the human factor in sales.
And that’s where chatbots have a lot to contribute: they can become a 24/7 customer service, and above all, capable of generating conversations. Potential clients don’t want to go through the experience of filling out long forms and then have to wait for an answer: they need immediate attention and human warmth.
Many of the SMEs do not have sales teams or customer service. If this is your case, then you could find in chatbots a way to relieve the pressure of generating and maintaining lots of conversations at the same time.
And if you have a sales team, using a chatbot can be a great idea. Not only does it ease the operational burden, but it helps them focus on what they really need to do: sell.
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Make content marketing more accurate.
As we can see, one of the advantages of artificial intelligence is that it is helping marketing to oil their strategies – refining them, making them more effective. And one of those strategies is content marketing.
Nowadays, good content is not just about composition and writing: it is also about making data-driven content. It is essential to create content from the data collected about audiences, to give them personalized content that resonates and is useful to them.
In this sense, there are already artificial intelligence tools capable of helping marketing teams to make specific content. For example, there are different types of software to create algorithms that detect what content can generate interest, based on previous readings by audiences. What’s more, some algorithms can predict the content to determine its potential to generate conversions.
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Increase sales with CRM.
CRM (English customer relationship manager ) are systems designed to optimize the relationship with customers. In general, these systems collect data through different platforms (mail, social networks, telephone) and streamline sales processes using the knowledge they obtain with this information.
Some CRM platforms are already using AI to help SMBs analyze this collected data. In this way, they can propose lead generation activities based on information analysis, and as a result, they can speed up the process of acquiring new customers — and ultimately, sales.
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Boosting SEO.
In the Google search engine, there are 67,000 searches per second. An impressive number, I must emphasize.
Searching is one of the most important sources of income for the giant Google, which is determined to improve it more and more. His artificial intelligence assistant, Duplex, uses neural networks to understand and generate natural language. Its Lens program enables image searches. There is constant work at Google to understand what users are looking for and how to give them better answers.
Consequently, companies will have to pay attention to these changes to satisfy the requirements of the Google search engine. And in this field, artificial intelligence again shows its advantages, combined with SEO.
Some of the AI and SEO-focused programs can help analyze and automate site rankings.
For analytics, examining essential metrics of the operation of the site, analyzing the competition and positioning, or optimizing the site to attract more potential customers.
Regarding automation, many of the SEO tasks are well known but difficult to execute, and this is where AI software oriented to SEO can come into play—automating the search for keywords, the use of links, the blogging, all tasks that take a considerable amount of runtime — an effort that can be saved with the use of AI.
Towards effective AI execution
AI is not so far from the solutions that an SME requires in its day today. By contrast, the AI implemented in those solutions is not something esoteric or utopian, and there are AI tools that can help solve business problems.
Remember that the chatbot has some functions that allow effective and accessible use of AI.
The conversation analysis function is one of them. The feature applies AI to the conversations companies have with their customers. Through text mining, artificial intelligence helps uncover the phrases that dominate those conversations, thereby telling companies what their customers are asking the most.
AI classifies that information into unigrams (one sentence) and bigrams (two sentences), which precisely detail the topics of the conversations. With this information in hand, companies benefit in various ways:
- They have reliable information on what are the topics of the conversations it is generating.
- They can use that information to make an effective landing page.
- They can configure Google Ads campaigns based on the specific demand of potential customers.
On the other hand, there is a suggested answer function. If the previous function was used to determine what the topics of conversation were (what is most asked by users), the automatic response function suggests answers based on the recognition of the bigrams. AI works from what your clients ask to give suggested answers and thus shorten the cycles of the dialogues.
Conclusion
AI can optimize your company’s daily work. It is not something far from the reality of your SME, but it is a tool that can make significant contributions.
If we dwell a little more on the example of the conversations, we can think of it this way: if you have around 100 thousand chats and you see what they ask you the most, you will probably miss a few days of work on it.
An AI trained for this task can do all of this for you, saving time in the process, as well as resources that you can allocate to what you do best.
Image Credit: LJ; Pexels