You’ve probably heard that artificial intelligence is going to take over the world. But what about now? How can businesses benefit from AI today?
Like most technologies, AI is seeping into every industry and is being used in ever more inventive ways and will continue to develop by leaps and bounds.
However, if you’re like most business owners, you might wonder how AI can help your company right now. This article looks at some ways AI is already being used by businesses and how it can help you in specific areas of your operations.
AI can help businesses automate repetive tasks, process information faster than humans, and analyse and make predictions based on data.
Here are a few ways AI can help in practice.
1. Improved Customer Experience
Artificial intelligence can collect data, analyze information specific to individual customers, and then provide personalized content based on this information. Within a fraction of the time it would take a human to complete the task.
2. Enhanced Security
Artificial intelligence strengthens cyber security across all digital platforms by offering real-time threat detection and mitigation.
3. Prediction of Financial Trends
With the advanced capabilities of artificial intelligence, we can now expect greater possibilities for predicting financial trends and determining business fundamentals such as revenue, cash flow, and cost calculation.
4. Customer Service Levels on Steroids
With the right technology, customer service can go beyond just answering questions and solving problems to using AI technology to offer hyper-personalized service levels at scale - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and regardless of time zones or languages.
5. Building Websites
With AI, businesses can create websites through the use of chatbots. These bots will ask you a series of questions and use the answers to create a website for you tailored to your needs and within your budget.
You may need to edit the content, yet it’s possible to have a functioning website in under ten minutes if you’re not too fussy with the look and feel or want a page in a rush.
6. Generating Leads
Lead generation can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly. With AI, data can be scraped from various networking sites producing contact details for various positions in companies within verticals.
Some providers are in their infancy and it’s worth experimenting first before signing up. The quickest way is to take the trial version and type in your own name to see what comes up.
7. Market Intelligence
Understanding market trends through the collection of data is essential for any business. What businesses don’t want to do is trawl through the mainstream and trade media looking for news affecting their industry, potential sales leads, potential regulatory issues, and processing the results daily.
There are services today utilising AI to do this in a fraction of the time and producing key points. The argument about AI replacing humans is moot here - no human can read that fast and distill everything down to key points.
8. Summarising
This next AI use is a little contentious. If you work in a job requiring the reading of volumes of data to produce a summary, AI can do this. Feed the AI with data, let it munch, and when it has finished, the key points are produced, saving you the time to read.
AI isn’t perfect. Sometimes it doesn’t understand nuances, humour, what’s written between the lines or what's not written. You will, however, have a rough idea of what the author or authors wrote about. Yet the whole point of reading is to understand a subject and so far, we need more convincing that this is a good use of AI.
In conclusion, AI has become an omnipresent, technological force that will soon impact every aspect of business. But AI is only using the data presented and is unable to - unless given the data - predict based on the weather, fashion trends, competitor activity or other factor.
Although AI can automate processes, it cannot think creatively or solve problems, two skills which humans possess and which AI will have to work hard to develop. Still, there are huge advances taking place in AI and the glitches will be ironed out eventually.
As well as being AI fans, we are a PR agency in Hong Kong helping technology and legal clients enhance their profile and become more visible in the media and on the web through media relations, branded content, corporate reputation, thought leadership programmes, and digital communications.
If you're looking for public relations in Hong Kong / Asia Pacific, please contact eight@eightpr.com