Artificial intelligence is one of the most popular talking points surrounding business at the moment.
The rise of AI programmes and how they could improve or hinder small business progress is constantly dominating the headlines.
The recent news of many industry leaders such as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak signing a petition to halt further AI developments has made many people worried about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on business.
However, the already available AI programmes and technology could help your business, so it’s important to know how these can be used in the future.
Technology that utilises artificial intelligence could be used in a multitude of different avenues for your small business.
As a small business, you may not be able to employ a lot of staff, which is where artificial intelligence could help your business get off on the right foot.
Using these programmes effectively could streamline your business and save your existing staff a lot of time, freeing up time for you to further your company.
Here are all the ways in which artificial intelligence could change how your small business operates.
Customer Experience
Customer service and optimising your customer’s experience with your business is one of the most important parts of customer retention.
Artificial intelligence could revolutionise your already existing customer service practices, and make the systems much easier to manage.
AI-powered chatbots are becoming increasingly adept at mimicking human-like interactions and being able to assist with queries and tasks.
By using chatbots powered by AI, small businesses can provide prompt and seamless customer service, which could reduce waiting times and cut costs.
Chatbots that are powered by artificial intelligence learn from all of their interactions, improving their accuracy and effectiveness.
Automation is one of the key benefits of having customer experience programmes powered by AI.
With AI customer service systems, small businesses can send automated routine reminders of orders and confirmation emails.
This ensures timely and consistent communication between you and your customers, improving your customer retention rate.
It can also save your time and resources, allowing you to allocate precious time elsewhere, allowing you to protect your business.
Many AI-powered chatbots can also be integrated with customer relationship management software, allowing your workflow to be more streamlined and easy to manage.
AI could positively change your business’s customer experience.
Marketing
Small businesses could utilise artificial intelligence to power their marketing strategies.
AI is important to create personalised marketing campaigns and could revolutionise how programmes analyse customer data such as behaviour, preferences and demographics.
This could make your marketing plan much more specific, and better targeted. This means that with artificial intelligence, your marketing efforts could be much more likely to work.
By using AI to better target potential customers, you could be reaching people who are much more likely to buy from your business.
This could also save you money, as your marketing efforts can be concentrated on avenues that are more likely to be profitable, meaning your return on advertising spend (ROAS) could improve massively.
AI programmes could affect many different forms of marketing, including social media advertising, marketing messages, email marketing techniques and other marketing content.
Many businesses are now using AI writing assistance to create marketing content for their website.
Artificial intelligence could make it much easier for you to create a more effective marketing plan.
Just like streaming programmes can use artificial intelligence to suggest programmes to watchers, marketing programmes can promote adverts and content that will be more likely to resonate with potential customers.
AI is also being used in search engine optimisation as well, so it can be used in almost every avenue of your business.
Internet and Data Research
There are many ways in which artificial intelligence could help you analyse search behaviour and internet trends. As aforementioned, this could be very useful when it comes to targeted marketing.
However, this could also help you when it comes to doing market research, which could really help you if your small business is in its initial stages.
As online algorithms change to become more sophisticated by using artificial intelligence, the amount of data they can reveal to you about your business can be highly beneficial to streamlining and perfecting your business model.
Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence-powered machine learning is one of the most commonly discussed forms of AI programmes that are being used in businesses today.
Machine learning is usually used to process a lot of business data in a small amount of time. These forms of algorithm learn over time, as they process more and more data.
This means it could analyse your business data, such as sales and expenditure information.
It could analyse your production, and allow you to know if any of your processes are less productive at certain times.
Many small businesses are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to streamline their business plans and processes.
Cyber Security
Many small businesses are now dependent on the Internet to operate their entire business.
It is very difficult for small businesses in the modern age to market themselves and operate properly without using the Internet.
For example, small businesses often have websites, use digital marketing and take orders online.
This is for a very specific reason, as more consumers now use the internet to find brands and products than ever before.
While having an online presence can be very helpful for your business in terms of marketing yourself and selling products, it can also come with plenty of potential risks.
For example, whenever someone buys something from your e-commerce website, their private financial and personal data will be processed through your website.
This puts your company at risk, as many hackers want to steal this data.
By hacking into your business’s cyber security practices, they can sell this data to other hackers to make money, or they can target your customers and steal money from them.
There are many ways in which artificial intelligence could change your cyber security protection plan.
For example, it can monitor patterns from data input that could detect if a cyber attack is happening.
It can also help to detect where the cyber attack is coming from and can use pattern recognition to help prevent a future threat.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence is being used to improve dark web monitoring, which helps to detect if your data is being sold by cybercriminals on the dark web.
Artificial intelligence is vastly improving the way in which businesses can protect themselves and their digital presence, and could protect your business even if you don’t have a wide cyber security team.
