Big businesses are currently using artificial intelligence (AI) for many purposes such as customer service. Amazon uses machine learning to identify relationships between items in its catalog and determine its customers’ preferences. Apple’s Siri is an intelligent personal assistant that uses natural language processing to recognize voice commands.
AI tends to be less common in small businesses. Salesforce’s 2016 Small Business Report found that 61 percent of small business owners weren’t yet ready to adopt it, typically indicating that AI was too complicated for their needs. However, AI can benefit small businesses in a variety of ways such as maximizing resources and prioritizing tasks.
Overview
Small businesses generally have a slower adoption rate of technology than larger businesses. Only 21 percent of small businesses were using AI features such as analytics and business intelligence as of 2016, according to the Small Business Report. However, AI has the potential to improve operational efficiency and productivity for businesses of all sizes by automating basic tasks. These benefits are especially useful for small businesses, which are typically more likely to have severe budget and time constraints. Small businesses that adopt new technology early can also appear larger than they really are.
Sales Benefits
AI can help businesses anticipate customer service problems before they occur by identifying the prospects that are most likely to buy their products or services. This capability allows businesses to personalize their marketing efforts to the preferences of each individual customer.
For example, AI can automatically send email messages to prospects when they’re most likely to be read. It can also predict the number of sales in the pipeline before the actual results are available. Some small businesses use AI to predict their sales leads. These benefits eliminate the need to spend time manually reviewing spreadsheets or tweaking marketing campaigns to attract leads.
Startups
AI provides specific benefits for startups by improving their early-stage growth. A customer lies behind each order, which AI can establish a connection with through a marriage of machine intelligence and human interaction. AI also scales easily, so it can continue to engage customers just as effectively when the startup grows. Additional benefits for startups include the capability of automating tasks in
marketing, sales and service.
Integration
Business owners often find that integrating AI into business operations is easier than expected once they get over their initial apprehensions about implementing it. Furthermore, it doesn’t require you to master its underlying technology if you can find a vendor that has already incorporated AI into their product offerings. A sales platform with AI directly embedded into it means that users just need to use the platform to realize its benefits.
Summary
CSCI has been helping small businesses in the San Diego area with system integration for over 30 years. We provide small business IT support as either an on-site engagement or a monthly managed service, often in partnerships with major companies such as Microsoft, HP, Cisco and Fortinet. Contact us today to find out what we can do for your business.
