Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days — large tech companies like Tesla advertise their cars with it, Amazon heavily relies on it, and Wall Street is heavily making use of it to improve the performance of their portfolios.
In all of this, it can be hard to understand what AI does, and how it can benefit you, a small business owner. Outside the glamour of cutting edge technologies that cost millions of dollars to use, small businesses have been adopting AI at faster and faster paces and seeing significant results from it.
In fact, one of the key indicators of whether a small business succeeds past its first five initial years is whether it has adopted advanced technologies like AI or not. So, it is not just glamour and theory, there are real concrete benefits that AI provides to small companies, and in this article, we’ll go over three main ones that prove AI software development is vital for your business.
#1 Find Better, More Fitting Employees More Quickly
Most small businesses quickly get familiar with human resources and the main principles of its management, but let’s stop for a second and consider the term itself — why is it called human resources and how valuable is it compared to other types of resources at your company’s disposal?
It is called human resources because the effort, work, and expertise of humans is a resource, and it is safe to say that it is one of the most valuable resources out there, especially for small companies (which often have limited access to capital). In fact, human resources are so important that they not only explain the success and failure of companies, but they also explain the success and failure of countries. Human capital is one of the primary indicators of a country’s success.
This all should show you how important it is to hire the right employees for your company — employees with the right skills, personalities, etc. Most large companies have dedicated recruiters that are constantly on the lookout for new talent, but this isn’t within the means of small companies. This is further complicated by the fact that most managers of small businesses have rather limited experience managing and recruiting people, which increases the chances of failure.
This is where AI comes to help. Using advanced data analyzing and machine learning technologies, AI programs can help you sift through thousands of CVs and shortlist a few that will be most suitable for your company. You then only need to interview those select few and then make a hire. This substantially cuts down on human biases, time, and effort, while it most likely provides superior results. Data from multiple studies have shown this: AI recruiters are often not only much cheaper than the human ones but they also substantially outperform them.
#2 Provide Superior, AI-Enhanced Customer Service
Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming a valuable ally of customer service agents. You would be wrong to turn away from it! With the functionalities of certain tools, Artificial Intelligence is able to support customer service agents in their interactions with customers.
How? There are a plethora of ways that AI can enhance the customer service experience and provide invaluable help to your customer service employees:
- By suggesting appropriate and relevant information to your employees based on the profiles and histories of buyers. This means that your employee will be able to provide more accurate help, recommendations, etc.
- Some AI programs have features that allow real-time listening and transcription of telephone conversations. This will prevent agents from taking notes and allow them to focus on the conversation more! This is also really important for data logging and collection.
#3 Measure and Analyze Large Amounts of Customer Data
We’ve saved the best for last: artificial intelligence makes it possible to analyze a large amount of customer data within a short, often instantaneous, amount of time. This is absolutely necessary for small companies as they don’t have dedicated data analysts capable of sifting through large volumes of data to detect patterns.
The possibility for companies to be able to use AI to measure certain aspects of their activities is a major advantage as well. In the past, keeping track of all your company’s data and having a proper valuation of your company’s worth was extremely expensive and time-consuming. The data provided to analysts were of mixed quality and the process was often neither systemic nor structured. In the future, companies will be able to use KPIs in real-time and have access to instant results, and this is all thanks to artificial intelligence. This means you can get investors on board much faster.
