Why Artificial Intelligence Needs to Be A Part of Your Business Strategy

Artificial intelligence- just the name is enough to scare off some business owners. As a society, we have become so dependent on robots that we fear them. It’s a Hollywood plotline that never gets old, feeding into our paranoia that someday robots may actually take over. Today, we are becoming increasingly dependent on the robots used for artificial intelligence and are only on the cusp of greater technological advances to come. But it is not something we should fear! Here’s why using artificial intelligence won’t spell doomsday for your business and will actually help you to grow and compete in our modern technological age.

First off, let’s review what artificial intelligence (AI) actually means. AI systems perform a range of behaviors, such as planning, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, data manipulation, social intelligence, and creativity, just to name a few. AI is commonly used in more ways than we typically even recognize. Some examples are when Google understands your search query, Alexa answers your questions, Facebook spots a face in a photo and recognizes it as a particular person, or how your bank knows your spending habits and uses this knowledge to detect credit card fraud. These are luxuries we have come to take for granted in our everyday lives. But besides sorting out our personal affairs, AI can be extremely beneficial for businesses. On the flip side, not using artificial intelligence can be detrimental for those who choose not to adopt this more convenient, modern technology.

Artificial intelligence makes running a business much simpler! Google is the world’s biggest and best public AI server. It offers great interactive and live tools, such as Analytics, Maps, AdWords, and so many others. Each can offer a business something unique and help drive search engine optimization. After all, SEO is the real reason you should be using these tools and paying so much attention to how Google views your site. By mastering Google’s plethora of applications and extensions, you’re making your site more noticeable to search bots and increasing the page rankings so consumers have a greater chance of finding you in their online search process. AI is doing the hard analytics work for you, so all you have to do is capitalize on the wide array of tools available.

Another way AI is changing the business landscape is with finances. It is helping us to understand our past financial crises and current issues by utilizing big data. But where AI really changes the game is that it not only can process these large quantities of data, but it can actually understand them and summarize its findings in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do so. Even more applications are coming for the financial industry and for advisors, so it’s best they figure out how to utilize artificial intelligence in their everyday work agendas, or else the robots may just put them out of a job one day soon.

In recent years, businesses have been putting their customer service at the forefront of their new initiatives, promising to grow their service departments and open up lines of transparency with customers. AI has helped smooth this process along by delivering robot help desks that provide quality customer care. It takes less time to program a series of systems than it does to train an entire department, saving businesses money and time. Today’s best customer service centers use voice activation to figure out problems and offer the best solutions possible. They have dramatically cut down on customer wait lines and the time it takes to find the right answer for each unique customer, all while increasing the privacy and security of customers.

Finally, artificial intelligence is changing the way marketing departments conduct research and plan their campaigns. AI’s unique ability to learn the habits and preferences of each consumer has become an integral part of the modern marketing approach to targeting. It is now easier than ever to retarget a consumer, as all user-owned devices can be paired to show the customer ads on every front, tailoring them to that unique individual and showing them what they will be most likely inclined to buy. Also, AI is used to better understand competitors. It can detect trends and patterns, recommending the best course of action for businesses to take to improve their competitive strategy. From here, it can intertwine other areas of the business, such as accounting and finance, to allocate funds to new initiatives and recommend timeframes for getting the job done.

So, has our worst nightmare come true? Have robots really taken over and replaced business as we know it? That’s a bit of an overstatement, but surely artificial intelligence has changed the ways we do business and it is here to stay. The future of AI remains unclear, while limitless possibilities loom for its untapped potential. Instead of fearing this unknown technological abyss, let’s embrace all that it can offer us and use it to our business’ advantage.