7 Ways AI Can Help Grow Your Startup
Artificial intelligence is the buzzword in business today, much like digital marketing a decade ago. It is taking the business world by storm. With its ability to automate mundane tasks, and drive efficiency, every bit of attention it gets is well-deserved.
Yes, the benefits are known to most. However, the question that lingers in the minds of most founders and CEOs is, “Well, how exactly AI is going to benefit our business?”
Here, we unravel the mysteries that cloud your mind about AI and its relevance to business. We have listed a few ways you can use AI right away and see the magic unfold. Hang on tight!
Let’s understand a few instances where AI can help transform your business for the better.
Over the past couple of decades, businesses have been moving towards automation. The need for greater efficiency drives this shift. Even as automation has improved over the years, it still lacks intelligence. It works by a set of rules, which are hard-coded into the system. Any deviation or difference either confuses the software or throws up an error. Here a self-learning machine learning algorithm can make a big difference. ML algorithms can organize the data by themselves, learning where specific types of data belong. They are also quick to spot anomalies and deviations, making automation far more efficient.
AI in programmatic advertising helps you target the audience who are more likely to convert. It also ensures the product-message-consumer fit by showing the relevant ads to the right set of people. Facebook and Google use AI to learn and group consumers based on their behavior. Several businesses today leverage the power of AI by advertising on these platforms.
Customer feedback comes in from different sources and levels in any organization – call centers, retail outlets, customer complaints, and the top management. Understandably, these would be documented in varied file formats and might also contain a few (human) errors. To draw intelligent insights, you need to collate data and rectify errors before analyzing it. If you are dealing with spreadsheets with virtually endless rows and columns, manually sorting it could easily take days or weeks. Machine algorithms can identify data and group them under different labels with little or no supervision. Natural language processing or NLP can understand the feedback from the information entered in the spreadsheets. It can also analyze the call records if need be. So, AI can help you organize data and process it to provide actionable insights. It can help you unlock the potential that remains scattered and hidden at different locations in your organization.
Business plans and annual forecasts often use historical data for making future predictions. Most small and medium-sized organizations take into account a few factors like seasonality, trends, and guesstimates to make a forecast. However, it’s far from accurate as it depends on a lot more variables. Let’s understand this with an example of the forecast for a fashion retailer. For instance, if the weather department has predicted a colder than usual winter in a region, the sales of winter wear may change drastically. It would impact demand for both style and quantities. Other factors could be the emergence of a new competitor or discounts provided by e-commerce players.
