AI is Here… It’s Time to Put It to Use

It can be challenging for small to medium-sized businesses to see the true value of artificial intelligence. After all, up until not that long ago, most people associated AI with things like the Terminator, so it has a bit of a reputation to make up for. Regardless, AI is now accessible enough that even these SMBs can embrace its features.

Let’s review some of the ways you could incorporate AI into your business, relatively easily.

Three Opportunities to Embrace AI

Let Your Customer Service Provide More Human Connection

When a client or customer reaches out to your business, they are going to be looking for answers to their questions. Furthermore, they will want these answers quickly. This is why it is so important for your entire team to be ready to provide some level of customer service.

That said, there are only so many hours in the day, and most (if not all) of your team members will have important tasks to complete within these hours. They simply can’t afford to spend a ton of time on the phone with a customer.

Enter AI and the opportunities it can offer, including taking on basic support needs as a customer service chatbot on a business’ website. No longer will a team member need to answer questions about open hours or available services. Instead, a prospect can ask your chatbot their basic questions whenever they want. Plus, they’ll still get an answer if your business is closed!

Meanwhile, your team is freed from the vast majority of their support duties and can better focus on their essential operational responsibilities.

Let Your Team Bypass Busy Work

Speaking of their responsibilities, there are plenty of tasks that nobody on your team looks forward to doing—moving data from one file to another, updating the same report with fresh figures each time something changes—yet these tasks still need to be done to keep the business running properly. They exist in a weird pocket where they detract from your overall productivity but can’t (or shouldn’t) simply be abandoned.

AI can solve this problem, too, by simply automating these tasks and running them at truly inhuman speeds. Data can be sorted and filed with intense accuracy, and again, your team is left with fewer distractions from their ultimate goals.

Let Yourself Make Better Informed Decisions

Your business should already have access to a mind-boggling amount of data —from customer feedback, current inventory, web traffic, sales reports, and more examples we don’t have the space to list here. This data means you have an incredible amount of information to base your decisions on… too much, in fact, which can often make finding the correct information challenging. Too often, this urges business owners to make decisions based entirely on gut instinct, rather than verifiable facts.

AI helps fix this through its pattern-recognition capabilities. Since it can sort through all of your data, it can spot correlations and causality that you would never spot while doing so exponentially faster. It can tell you things like, “Website visitors from Chicagoland fill out the contact us page 15% more frequently after viewing the about us page,” or “We sell 20% more of Product X throughout Q2.”

All of a sudden, you have the information to make decisions that work better for your business.

All in all, it just goes to show: using AI effectively doesn’t mean buying the best software, it’s about strategically identifying the right option for your needs and putting it to proper use.

BSGtech is here to help the businesses of Chicagoland with their various technology needs, including optimizing the use of the tools they have available. If you’d like to learn more about what we can help you do, give us a call at (866) 546-1004.