You can’t afford NOT to use Artificial Intelligence
Some people don’t believe in the effectiveness of artificial intelligence, whereas others are afraid of the high cost of smart solutions. In this article, I’m going to show you why you need artificial intelligence in your business by presenting its benefits evidenced by market research.
What you must bear in mind, though, is that applying artificial intelligence to your business won’t change it right away: you need to implement it in a well-thought-out way to reach your business goals.
Artificial Intelligence for everyone
Although AI solutions do require some investments, the costs are actually getting lower year by year. According to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021 published by Stanford University, training costs of a contemporary image-recognition system have gone down by around 150 times in the past 4 years.
Everybody knows that technology gets cheaper with time. This is also connected with the American engineer Gordon Moore’s observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit double about every two years. Moore’s law means in fact that we can expect the efficiency of an application to double every two years, with the same cost of components. However, in the case of AI, Moore’s law is falling way behind.
Since 2012, AI performance has been doubling every 3.4 months. This growth makes it possible not only to develop increasingly advanced models but also to produce the currently applied models in a simpler and cheaper manner. Nowadays, every company using data in some way – e.g. by analysing the number of visits to a website, product and service sales, financial results, or CCTV coverage – can enhance its performance without an exorbitant budget. We’re heading towards the development of smart solutions at affordable prices.
Saved by the cost reduction in business maintenance
As the cost of prediction continues to drop, we’ll use more of it for traditional prediction problems such as inventory management because we can predict faster, cheaper, and better.Ajay AgarwalStrategy Professor, McKinsey
Recent years have shown that business operating costs are getting more and more burdensome. General and administrative expenses are growing much quicker than revenues (15.4% to 6.0%). Businesses are forced to unlock serious cost reductions, but some approaches may be too extreme and they may significantly lower the company’s performance and the comfort of work. This problem can be solved by using smart solutions in business. According to 63% of the organisations surveyed, the need to reduce costs will require them to use AI.
There is huge potential in business process automation and business logic calibration. The use of AI saves time and money through automation of complex processes and replacing humans in simple and monotonous tasks, which can prevent losses generated by human error. Automation can take place in a number of areas: replacing manual data input by OCR systems, product and service recommendations, production skills relocation as well as expenditure and collection effectiveness analyses. According to McKinsey & Company, the use of cutting-edge technologies, including AI, can reduce indirect costs by as much as 15 to 20% in 12 to 18 months.
Compete with the best
To survive on the market, you need to constantly improve the attractiveness of your business. Nowadays, the pressure related to customer acquisition and retention is so high that competition between companies across the market is getting more aggressive and exhausting. So far, you would be able to gain a competitive advantage by building brand awareness and increasing the accessibility of your offer, for instance by means of a website.
Currently, most businesses have implemented these approaches and their work is focused on reaching as many users as possible. To achieve this, they can make use of AI solutions, which provide a totally different perspective on the market. A study run by BCG shows that as many as 84% of the managers surveyed believe that AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.
AI makes it easier to understand the needs of every customer thoroughly, especially when it comes to their unique characteristics. Thanks to this, companies can offer them the right products in the right place at the right time.
The recommendations show not only what product is suitable for a particular customer but also how and when to offer the suggestion. What’s more, by using, AI you can automate the contact with the customers (e.g. with the help of smart chatbots) and thus ensure 24-hour customer support. This way, you’re going to enter the world of modern AI-based marketing. The biggest tech corporations have made use of AI for a long time now and they still see its potential – this is visible in their growing financial outlays on AI.
By employing AI, you can provide your customers with unique experience that is unattainable among your competition. Besides, the process of AI popularisation in business is only at an initial stage. This means you have a chance to become the so-called first mover – a business that gains a competitive advantage by being the first to use smart solution in a given sector.
Supporting Business Analytics
Knowledge has always been the key to success: it helps understand the present and prepare for what the future may bring.
The current situation requires businesses to analyse huge sets of data to obtain crucial information about the market. However, an analysis of mass data without any specialist tools may lead to overlooking some relevant or even essential facts. Such omissions don’t have to translate directly into financial losses but they are tantamount to missing out on a chance to gain a competitive edge.
AI plays a key role in data analytics. It makes it possible to analyse data in an adequate and comprehensive way, which leads to practical conclusions. Humans have limitations that make analysing big and unstructured data difficult. AI, on the contrary, can do this very well, detecting patterns and relations hidden in data. This is why you should seriously consider introducing AI into your business so that you don’t miss out on a great opportunity.
Endnote
No matter if you’re a tech tycoon or a small start-up, smart solutions are within your reach. Progress makes technology affordable. Thanks to its huge processing capacity and access to large datasets accompanied by new approaches to machine learning, it is already possible to implement automation at an advanced level. Based on this state of the art, every serious business is likely to integrate AI to some extent in the nearest future.
For some, it will be a means to increase the profit and sales, while for others – a method of cutting their losses. AI can also be used to establish relationships with the audience. So, think about how you can benefit from artificial intelligence, so that you don’t lag behind but rather outdistance your competition.
