5 things AI could do for your business right now

It’s time small businesses gained big business capability.

So let’s talk about how artificial intelligence could help you, in your business, right now.

Here’s 5 things AI could do for your business:

1) Automate and save time

AI has the incredible ability to be able to perform repetitive tasks, quickly and accurately; at scale. Its already proven to be faster and more accurate than humans attempting similar tasks.

This includes reading text, number crunching and finding patterns in code. Current applications for businesses include AI assistants, voice-to-text features, automated email responders and much more.

AI can also automate business tasks such as recording notes, scheduling meetings, business alerts, task reminders and even making phone calls on your behalf.

2) Smarter data, results in real-time

Even the smallest of businesses have vasts amounts of data. Consider the amount of data across accounting, website, personnel, POS and social analytics alone.

There’s no way that small business owners can monitor and track all of this data without help. AI can take all of this data, analyse it, make sense of it and report back the information that you need to know.

In addition, AI does all of this in a matter of seconds and can make predictions based on historical data and past behaviour. For example, imagine being able to track all of your POS, costs and net revenue data in real-time and compare it against past periods?

3) Customer insights

I don’t need to tell you that customers are more demanding than ever. That also means that achieving customer satisfaction is more difficult than ever.

And if your customers aren’t happy; they won’t be back; no questions asked.

Now you’re wondering, how can AI increase my customer satisfaction and loyalty? Good question. Well, AI can analyse all of your customer data from sources such as CRM, POS, social media, web analytics and more. The data you don’t have time to analyse yourself…

From this, you can gain deeper insights that you can use to quickly improve your customer’s experience.

For example, in the same way that ecommerce retailers have an extensive array of data on those who’ve visited their online store, in the future, AI facial recognition software will be used to give the same degree of analysis to offline retailers. Brick-and-mortar retailers will know exactly how many people walked past their store, visited, the time they spent shopping and much more.

All of this leads to knowing more about the customer, which in turn can help drive greater engagement, customer satisfaction and sales.

4) Smarter social media

The impact of social media on your business might not be immediately obvious. These days it can be time-consuming and costly.

But this shouldn’t scare small business owners away from utilising social media as a communication and marketing tool. The benefits of social media for small businesses are substantial.

Instead, small businesses need to get smarter about how they use social media. From a paid perspective, Facebook utilises AI algorithms to enable advertisers to be more cost-effective, targeted and smarter than ever.

From a non-paid perspective, AI-powered social listening allows you to monitor customer sentiment towards your business, gives you real-time social data such as followers and engagement, and tools such as CoSchedule uses AI to automatically share updates based on previous high-performing posts.

5) Predictive insights and alerts

What if you could ask any question about your business and instantly receive an answer? With the magic of AI, you can.

AI learns from past business data, analyses it, finds trends and predicts future possibilities.

In real business terms, AI can give you important insights in almost real-time. Anything from profit-and-loss to website visitors to sales on a rainy Thursday, and anything in between.

But machine learning doesn’t just read data, it finds patterns and predicts when they’ll happen again. For example, if you’re a seasonal business like a cafe in a tourist destination such as the Gold Coast of Australia, you might want to compare seasonal profit differences, set revenue targets and plan your staff rosters’ to suit.

So there you have it, five simple ways that artificial intelligence could help you, in your business, right now. At Aider, we believe it’s time small businesses gained big business capability. If you want to sign-up for free with Aider, click here.