Artificial Intelligence Can Serve a Valuable Role in Small Businesses

We’ve seen artificial intelligence used more and more commonly in businesses, largely in the form of machine learning. What’s even nicer is that it is becoming more and more accessible to smaller businesses as well. Let’s discuss how a small business might put AI to use, or in other words, how you can get started doing so.

How Can Today’s Small Businesses Use Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is inherently flexible, as it's really nothing more than our attempts to mimic our own cognitive processes. Basically, all AI is, is software that is designed to follow similar patterns as our own learning and reasoning processes do in order to solve problems. That’s it, and that’s what makes AI so potentially useful—even to a small business.

Here are just a few ways that AI can be used to improve your operations:

Enhancing Cybersecurity

The things your employees do each and every day as a part of their work responsibilities are likely somewhat consistent. Naturally, there will be a little bit of variety, but in the grand scheme of things, your team members will each do generally the same things each day. Artificially intelligent systems simply make predictions based on data and act according to these predictions. In terms of security, this means that an artificially intelligent system could take note when a user’s account was demonstrating odd activity (like logins in the wee hours of the morning from places across the world) or an employee does something that potentially undermines security, and stop it. 

Optimizing Customer Service

As much as businesses are meant to serve their customers, the necessary activities related to this service take time—time that sometimes needs to be spent on other business needs and processes. Artificially intelligent systems can (and are) used now to assist businesses with their customer service needs. If you’ve sought out assistance on a website to be greeted by a little pop-up offering to answer your questions, you’ve witnessed AI in action.

By using these tools to help your customers find the answers to their questions, you take much of the burden off of your workers while also collecting information that your business either needs or could benefit from knowing.

Finessing Customer Relationships and Marketing Efforts

If you’re tracking your marketing efforts the way you should be, there’s going to be a lot of data and insights generated, which means there should be a lot of data being processed and crunched. This amount of data is apt to be too much for your employees to commit the time and effort to keeping organized, which makes the capabilities of AI so useful. AI can take over these organizational and analytical processes on your business’ behalf, allowing you to identify which of your efforts are most worthwhile and get the best response from your intended audience. These insights can then inform your future efforts, making them more effective for you.

Artificial Intelligence is More Accessible Than Ever

Reach out to us to learn more about machine learning and other IT capabilities that we can help you implement. Give SCW a call at (509) 534-1530 today to discuss what your options may be.