In today’s world, artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping companies cut operating costs, boost productivity and deliver the ultimate customer experience and it’s only going to get more powerful, more entrenched in how we work.  Here’s how to get started (if you haven’t already) leveraging AI to transform your own business, right now.

1. Get to know AI

Take the time to become familiar with what AI can do. There’s a wealth of online information and resources available to familiarise yourself with the basic concepts of AI including this free course helping you to grasp the basics “Intro into artificial intelligence” by Udacity.  Notice what other companies are doing, notice what’s becoming available to you personally on a day to day basis and keep AI front of mind.  “We do xx by xxx, how could we use AI to improve this process/experience/product or service?”

2. Identify areas of your business AI can improve

Once you’re up to speed on the basics, start to explore different ideas. Think about how you can add AI capabilities to your existing products and services. What’s a manual process in your business that frustrates both you/your team and your customers?  As an example, we want to make it easier for both prospective team members and clients to start working with us.  We’re developing a messenger chatbot on our Facebook page to make that initial enquiry a better experience for our prospects, delivering the right information at the right time so they can make an informed decision (quickly) while qualifying them from our perspective, thus improving our productivity.

3.  Assess your internal resources

There’s a big difference in what AI can do for your business and what you have the time, skillset and resources to achieve in a given time.  Start with something small and build AI processes as you learn.  Develop a team and tools to help you grow this part of your business without impacting on your own time and where you add value.

Ways to start using AI to transform your business

Business Management

• spam filters
• smart email categorisation
• voice to text features
• smart personal assistants, such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now
• automated responders and online customer support
• process automation
• sales and business forecasting
• security surveillance
• smart devices that adjust according to behaviour
• automated insights, especially for data-driven industries (eg financial services or e-commerce)

Ecommerce

• smart searches and relevance features
• personalisation as a service
• product recommendations and purchase predictions
• fraud detection and prevention for online transactions
• dynamic price optimisation based on machine learning

Marketing

• recommendations and content curation
• personalisation of news feeds
• pattern and image recognition
• language recognition – to digest unstructured data from customers and sales prospects
• ad targeting and optimised, real-time bidding
• data analysis and customer segmentation
• social semantics and sentiment analysis
• automated web design
• predictive customer service

What AI can’t do and shouldn’t do is replace what makes your business unique, that’s you and your people.  Used wisely you can harness the power of data, machine learning and automation over manual processes.  Think about how this could compliment where your people add value for your business and your customers … we couldn’t and shouldn’t ever replace that personalised service showing those we work with that they are not a number, they are heard and each and every one has different needs (in our case) which are catered for.

Comment below, how are you (or could you) using artificial intelligence to transform your business? Also, download your free guide here to check out how you can automate your business.