Once the preserve of science fiction movies, artificial intelligence and machine learning have today become part of our daily lives. Our smartphones use AI to help us take better photographs, whilst ecommerce stores use it to recommend us better product recommendations, and search engines to provide more accurate and personalised results.
Today, the technology is making waves across a variety of industries, helping businesses improve efficiency, scale faster, and keep their customers happy.
How AI helps companies improve their efficiency
Companies are always one the lookout for ways to boost their bottom lines, and one way to do this is to make efficiency savings. Machine learning can help companies become more efficient by analysing data from across the business and using this “big data” to find the areas that are slow, difficult, and causing the bottlenecks.
One area where many companies face waste is with quality assurance. The more complex the product being created, the more difficult it is for people to check that it passes their quality assurance checks before being sent out to customers. And faulty products are not only a waste of money and resources in production, but they can also lose companies long-term customers.
AI can help with quality assurance checks throughout the production line, with an array of sensors that can check not just weight and size, but also much finer details, such as hairline cracks or other defects that may not be visible to the naked eye. And critically, AI can do these assurance checks at speed, with the human eye able to view and process 6-12 images per second, whilst an advanced machine from this website can process thousands of product images per minute.
How AI helps companies scale
Scaling a company can be a difficult process, from delivering on the sales objectives to finding the processes that keep a growing team working effectively, and AI can help.
Algorithms can help sales teams find, prioritise, and qualify leads, streamlining the process from start to finish. AI can help pull together data on potential leads form a variety of sources, creating a profile of the customer that a well-trained sales person can use to find common ground and better explain the purpose of a business’ product or service.
Meanwhile, marketers can make use of AI to help optimise their ad spends across the online and offline realms to make sure that they are making the most effective use of their budgets. The big advertising platforms like Google and Facebook already use a variety of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to help advertisers achieve the best results, and the use of these tools is only going to expand in the future.
How AI helps companies keep their customers happy
It is already common to find AI implementations in customer service platforms today, with companies using the technology to help customers find the answers to their questions more quickly and connect those with more unique queries to a human more quickly.
Badly implemented support bots are infuriating, but when done well the platform is seamless. Those with simple queries will have their questions answered directly in the chat by a bot, without taking time away from the support staff, which means that when someone does have a more complex query then the wait times to connect to a member of the support team is significantly reduced, making everyone happier.
Artificial intelligence is still in its relative infancy today, but its benefits are already apparent with companies around the world turning to the technology to help them improve efficiencies and grow. Those that do not invest in the technology today may soon be left behind.