We live in an era where science fiction ideas of yesteryear are becoming a part of our everyday life. Virtual reality, humanoid robots and artificial intelligence are the most prominent examples of this tendency in action.
Artificial Intelligence: A Glimpse
Artificial intelligence in particular has been one of humanity’s long-standing dreams. Thanks to massive increases in computing power over the years, we can now program complex AI systems to perform a wide variety of tasks.
The creation of AI has changed the business landscape over night. What used to be difficult business problems could now be solved with little effort and at a fraction of the cost. New business models are emerging as well thanks to AI, creating whole new industries and industry niches in the process. You can find numerous artificial intelligence examples around.
Companies are still trying to adapt to these changes, with mixed results. The greatest difficulty so far has been the inability of leadership to grasp the true scope of AI transformation.
So, in order to bring you up to speed, we present to you a list of 8 ways in which AI is changing the business landscape. Get to know the AI impact on various businesses in general.
AI in Business: Impact to Know
1. Personalised User Experience on Demand
AI can analyse user behaviour across different channels in order to dynamically generate highly personalised experiences. As a result, an increasing number of businesses are using AI for user experience customisation. This can be based on data such as browsing history, on-page behaviour, chat logs, and product purchases.
So, there is less and less need for companies to directly ask users for information. Since AI can easily track down things such as names, email address, and all kinds of information.
2. Custom Social Media Content
Some experts are predicting that AI will have the most impact on social media. Personalised content targeting is becoming the new norm on sites such as Facebook and YouTube. The purpose of AI-driven content suggestions on social media is to create more sales opportunities by efficiently determining content-user fit.
Hence, an AI-powered marketing stack can quickly find out whether a given user is interested in a particular piece content. And, it could then provide said content via targeted ads, sponsored links, and other suggestion mechanisms.
3. Fraud Detection
Not all advancements in AI have been beneficial for business. AI text generation has reached a point where machine-generated text is now difficult to distinguish from text written by humans. In fact, this has created many opportunities for online fraud.
Fortunately, the computing power of AI can also be used for fraud detection. Therefore, businesses like Amazon are now using AI fraud detection software to defend themselves from various fraud schemes. This may include detection of posting fake reviews, or making fraudulent payment transactions.
4. Predicting Customer Behaviour
AI is already being used for customer behaviour prediction, but the technology is still in its infancy. However, we can expect further developments in the near future. Presently, businesses are using AI prediction machines. So, AI is used to determine whether a customer is exhibiting buying behaviour or looking for support. This may even help while considering switching to another service provider.
And, by measuring the accuracy of these predictions, AI researchers are gathering the data necessary to build more accurate prediction models.
5. Customer Support Chatbots
AI has found extensive use in the field of natural language processing (NLP), where it’s being employed for procedural text generation. Such AI systems can then be linked with chat-based interfaces to create a multi-purpose chatbots.
So, business use chatbots to provide 24/7 customer support and gather customer data. Further, you can get product suggestions. Moreover, the recent data also suggests that some customers prefer chatbots to live customer support representatives.
6. Transforming Data into Insights
Business workflows are becoming increasingly data-driven, which is raising demand for in-house data scientists. Unfortunately, hiring a full-time data scientist is not an option for a lot of companies. But, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, this is becoming less of a concern.
Therefore, by using sophisticated machine learning algorithms, AI can derive insights from data without human supervision. Thanks to AI, even small businesses now have access to powerful insights for running more effective marketing campaigns.
7. Solving HR Tasks
AI is transforming HR departments across the industry, from small businesses to large corporate enterprises. It is mainly being used to find promising employees among candidates. Candidate research used to require hours of work in the past, through AI, it can now be accomplished in seconds.
Some companies are even using AI assistants during interviews. But, we’re still not at the point where the process has been fully automated.
8. Cybersecurity
Online security is quickly becoming the number one issue in IT, especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the passing of the GDPR in the EU. To combat the rising threat of hackers, security researchers are exploring AI-powered countermeasures and defence systems.
An AI can respond to threats many times faster than even the best security expert. And, it can evolve its defensive capabilities by learning from previous attacks. So, having a guardian AI is a much more affordable cybersecurity solution than maintaining a full cybersecurity department.
Artficial Intelligence: The Bottom Line
AI represents the next logical step in the evolution of technology. The power of AI lies in its ability to gather and analyse data on a massive scale, as well as in its ability to automate repetitive tasks.
Moreover, Artificial Intelligence is being increasingly used for tasks such as improving business processes. In addition to it, AI helps in streamlining strategic output, and eliminating guesswork from decision-making.
To conclude, the sooner you adapt to this new business paradigm, the better prepared you will be for the future.
This is a guest post by Michael Deane, one of the editors of Qeedle, a small business magazine. When not blogging (or working), he can usually be spotted on the track, doing his laps, or with his nose deep in the latest John Grisham collection.
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