Used correctly, AI can be a disruptive force in business. AI can help businesses in many ways such as to increase sales, improve customer experience, detect fraud, automate work processes, increase efficiency, reduce costs, and can even provide predictive analysis dictating future consumer behavior.

Businesses can spend nearly 50% of workdays per year on administration tasks alone. By utilizing AI, administration tasks such as logging expenses and crunching data can be performed by AI and AI can in fact take the majority of administration tasks away from humans resulting in a huge impact on productivity freeing up people to focus on what matters. AI can replace manual analyses and dramatically expand the data processing capabilities of your firm. AI technology can help create more successful operations by applying AI technology to sales, marketing, HR, and product teams.

AI can be utilized in helping build customer loyalty and enhance customer satisfaction. Tools like Gong, Chorus, and Jog record and transcribe the calls your sales reps have. They then compare the strategies employed by your most successful sales reps to every other salesperson within the company. AI platforms can analyze a variety of variables like word choice, or the ratio of time spent talking versus listening. The tools help analyze performance and coach salespeople to communicate more like your most successful sellers.

AI can help your marketing team build better ads. Advancements in marketing, particularly getting more ROI from marketing effort, is synonymous with getting more granular with targeting the right prospects at the right time, and that task requires more data and better use of that information.

The rise of customer service chatbots and virtual assistants are also a result of artificial intelligence. Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are just some examples. The AI assistant can function to understand natural language to communicate with individuals effectively and in various languages and it is so good that customers do not realise they are not talking to a human thus helping expedite customer service and increase the number of customers your existing team can serve. Speech-to-text employed in chatbots and other AI systems is such an important tool as it transcribes both voice and sound into text that is easy to read and understand and stored as metadata to be analysed and utilized later on.

In e-commerce, AI finds and prioritizes the most interesting customer-focused content on your website and can sort through enormous amounts of user-generated content. This helps you keep your customers engaged while choosing only the most valuable content to feature on your website and social media and intelligently recommend additional products and features to sell.

Practical AI applications can manifest in all sorts of ways depending on your organizational needs. The real problem some businesses will face however is not embracing AI or preparing for it. Even if you as a company are not using AI, you need to appreciate the importance of AI, and in particular, your data, so that you can prepare for AI in the future.

Data is key to your business health and AI. AI needs data to learn and work properly and the more relevant data you have for your business the better equipped you will be. Business owners, big and small to startup, need to store and record data in a consistent manner for eventual use with AI even if they are not using it today, as having that data will be of incredible value for your future business practices. Simply put, one of the best ways for leaders to prepare for the future with AI is to make sure their data is recorded using compatible formats and is easily retrievable.

At endeavit, we help business owners understand where AI can be employed in their business and in fact if they actually need it in the first place. We help identify areas where data generation and storage can be utilized effectively and give clear direction into the use of AI systems for better business efficiencies and performance.