Utilising AI to Transform your Small Business

AI has the potential to transform any business – and it’s no longer out of reach for smaller enterprises with smaller budgets. Whether you’re looking to make better data-driven decisions, streamline business processes or automate tasks, AI has a lot to offer. Outcomes from investing in AI can include optimised products and services, customer engagement, and increased revenue. These are some of the ways in which AI has the power to transform.

Using AI to Automate

There are lots of benefits to automating processes within your business, from consistency to efficiency. Currently, AI can be used to introduce automation in a number of different ways, including:

• Chatbots – These are AI-powered programmes that can carry out conversations as a human would. They can handle simple queries on the phone, via social media or customer services, freeing up human operators for other tasks and offering 24/7 support.
• Predictive analytics – Here, AI is being used to glean insights to predict future trends and customer behaviours so that decision-making and strategy can be improved.
• Robotic Process Automation – This is simply the process of using software bots to bring automation to repetitive tasks that can be incredibly time consuming when done manually. That might be data entry, for example, or invoice processing.
• Natural language processing – Here, AI will provide automated support for a range of tasks, from sentiment analysis to document classification and content creation, whether that is video content or written content.

What AI tools are currently available to small businesses?

• Chat GPT-3 – This AI-powered chatbot can be used to engage in human conversations. In the real world that means it is useful everywhere, from customer service conversations to translation. It has been trained on huge data sets of real-world conversations so its content is accurate, relevant, and grammatically correct.
• Microsoft Co-Pilot – Created for efficiency, Microsoft Co-Pilot supports human workers by suggesting next steps and providing information in real time. It is designed to improve productivity and to reduce errors and the time that is taken up in searching for information.
• Google Bard – If you’re looking to create content, whether that is product descriptions or headlines, Google Bard is designed to generate creative, coherent text.

These are just three of the options that are currently available to small businesses. AI tools can also provide support in other key areas, from cyber security to business intelligence. As the market expands it will be up to each business to experiment with the AI that is likely to be the most effective.

A word of caution.

AI doesn’t come without its downfalls. Data bias, for example, is a significant problem, as if AI has been trained on biased data then this will result in biased decisions and outcomes. It’s also important to ensure that any AI you opt for you understand completely – to help avoid the security issues that can arise where it is not being properly implemented.
AI is a powerful tool for transforming any business and there are lots of ways that you can start to access this today.

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Our wide range of solutions can involve the usage of AI to advance your business. If you want to kickstart a journey into advancing your IT services, get in touch today.