3 Ways Small Businesses Can Quickly Embrace AI Without Big Data or Programmers
When AI was first launched, it was perceived as a that could revolutionize business models by creating a full understanding of a clients’ profile and their needs. It would be a must-have technology for large businesses to boost their balances and a magic tool for small business owners to remove barriers between their product or service and the final user — using the right data, of course.
At first, AI appeared to be something that could almost “magically” make perfect predictions about the success or failure of any product just by analyzing different consumers’ profiles and their purchasing behaviors. Startups imagined a world where market traction could be reached simply by running a Python script, rather than optimizing a minimum viable product.
Financial investors have welcomed AI as the beginning of a new financial cycle pumping large amounts of money at any stock labeled AI-based. The “dot-com era” that started in the 90s — and with it, the stock market crash due to excessive speculation — seemed to be replaced by the “AI-era.” Images of humans resting while robots worked on their behalf were the collective image of how this new era would look alike. FOMO (fear of missing out) did the rest, with large companies jumping into this technology without fully understanding it, or in many cases, without even knowing what to do with it. Python developers quickly became among the top hiring needs of many companies.
Since initiation, however, AI adoption has proven to be very challenging for large companies and presented huge barriers for small businesses; from Amazon Alexa and Facebook’s embarrassing moments to China’s police confessing of shaming the wrong person (who turned out to be a billionaire woman) caused by trust of their facial recognition system. Machines have proven to be less than perfect and behind humans in many cases, and to date, their glitches have indicated that they are simply not quite there yet. Hence the question: If large businesses haven’t yet mastered AI, how can small businesses succeed in this task? And even before that, a more generic question: Can small businesses benefit from AI, or is this something that only large companies — with large datasets, programmers and data analysts — benefit from?
Before you are told that small businesses simply don’t have enough data for jumping into AI and/or that not hiring a data scientist will seriously compromise your budget, clarification is needed. AI is often confused with Machine Learning. AI is a broad umbrella term that includes any application from text analysis to robotics, and Machine Learning is just a subset of AI. While AI is meant to do human tasks faster and more precisely, (hence removing the human-error factor), Machine Learning helps in predicting outcomes and making estimations.
Although Machine Learning has become much more approachable with platforms such as Amazon Pre-trained AI Services or Google Colab — which allows you to build a basic model in a matter of minutes without the need for hiring data scientists, you might not have the skills or more likely the data to run a trustworthy model. You still have the option, however, to use AI to automate your daily routines.
