Leverage The Capabilities Of AI To Outcompete Your Rivals

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a sci-fi concept, but a reality that is reshaping all industries with its impact. From improving customer experience, automating work processes, providing predictive analytics, increasing sales, and detecting fraud, AI can help businesses improve various performance aspects. Despite this, it is surprising that still, the majority of businesses are still not making use of the capabilities of AI.

IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022 found that only 35% of businesses are tapping into the potential of AI, while 42% of businesses are looking for ways to use it.

NewVantage Partners Big Data and AI Executive Survey found that 90% of prominent companies invest in AI, but only 14.6% use it in their work.

What stops companies from adopting and using AI in their work? One of the significant barriers to AI adaptation is low-level AI literacy. Only 20% of executives are confident that they understand AI, while 67% say they need more understanding of how to apply AI in their business processes.

Do you also experience low-level AI literacy? This blog will help you feel confident about AI, so you can figure out how AI can be utilized to outperform your rivals and achieve business goals.

So, let’s get started.

The Power of AI and Its Daily Impact on Businesses

1. Generative AI

Generative AI is an advanced version of AI that can learn from data and generate outputs that are novel, diverse, and realistic based on text prompts. For example, Generative AI can read customer insights and generate a summary of them to help a business executive to understand them.

Inspired by the capabilities of Generative AI, businesses across all industries are adopting Generative AI. According to Statista, 37% of the professionals working in marketing and advertising had used AI to improve their business processes.

Generative AI can influence serval aspects of the business. From writing content like emails, social media posts, product descriptions, and more. Furthermore, it also transforms the customer journey by understanding customers’ preferences and generative tailored recommendations.

This is just a glimpse of Generative AI use cases of business. Some of the other use cases of Generative AI for businesses are mentioned below:

• By 2025, more than 30% of new drugs and materials will be discovered using Generative AI (source: Gartner).
• 30% of outbound marketing messages such as marketing copy and personalized advertising will be generated using Generative AI (Source: Gartner). 58.9% of marketers are using AI to optimize existing content, while 57.1% of marketers use AI to create long-form content in the USA. (Source: Survey by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, in partnership with Vennli)

2. Intelligent Automation

AI can help businesses to perform repetitive tasks or processes that require no creativity or problem-solving skills with minimal human intervention. For instance, data entry, scheduling appointments, emailing, copying, and so on.

Do you know, on average employees waste more than 21 days a year working on repetitive tasks? This calculates to 60 hours per month (Source: smart sheet)

AI can automate these repetitive tasks, so employees can spend more time on productive tasks that require creative thinking and problem-solving skills. For instance, let’s say you want to automate the process of the lead qualification process. With the help of AI tools such as Einstein Lead Scoring, you can automate the process of scoring leads based on their likelihood of conversion.

3. Building Hyper Personalized Experience

Nowadays, more and more businesses are adopting personalization. According to a Forrester report, 89% of businesses are investing in personalization. Do you also want to be among that 89% of businesses or want to explore the power of AI to build hyper-personalized customer experiences?

Hyper Personalization is the exercise of making use of real-time customer data to create personalized experiences that meets the needs of individual customers. By making use of technology like ML, predictive analytics, and chatbots, it can enable businesses to assess customer data and create an experience that meets the current need of customers.

Amazon the leading eCommerce giant is making use of AI to create a homepage specific to each customer. This homepage is based on the customer’s browsing history, purchase behavior, preferences, etc. This improves the customer’s likelihood of purchasing by showing products that match their interests and current needs.

According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, over 90% of customers say they are most likely to purchase a business that offers a hyper-personalized experience.

4. Improving Decision-Making

Another use case of AI for business can be found in improving decision-making. AI can ablaze the vast amount of data by using various technologies such as:

• Machine learning: This helps AI to learn from data and make predictions.
• Natural language processing (NLP): This helps AI to interpret text-based data and analyze it to generate reports.
• AI tools can be used to find insights into the data that help businesses to improve various aspects.
• AI-guided systems can clean and visualize the data so businesses can easily understand it.
• Classification, cataloging, and quality methods are used by AI to ensure the data is free from errors.

I believe that businesses should use AI to learn from data and make predictions to achieve their goals. For instance, you can employ AI to analyze customer behavior data such as past purchases, website interactions, and social media engagement with your brand. AI can visualize this data in a consumable format to make it more straightforward for you to understand it.

5. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

The concept of chatbots is not a new invention. Starting from the introduction of Eliza in 1966, the world’s first AI chatbot to today’s chatbots like ChatGPT, Replika – and the list goes on, are changing the way businesses interact with customers.

These chatbots are making use of techniques such as NLP, machine learning, and deep learning to understand human input and generate relevant output. They can provide 24*7 customer support to help businesses to assist their customers whenever they need it. Virtual assistants can take into consideration tasks like scheduling, searching, emailing, etc, to enable employees to become more productive in tasks that demand their attention rather than repetitive tasks.

58% of B2B and B2C companies are using Chatbots (Source: Thrivemyway), and more are planning to invest in chatbots due to several reasons:

• Chatbots helped businesses to save customer service costs by providing quick answers to 80% of routine questions. (Source: IBM)
• Chatbots can improve the customer retention rate by 53% while reducing the churn rate by 36%. Chatbots can also improve customer loyalty by 42%. (Source: Simplr)
• Chatbots can improve the conversion rate by 67%, resulting in a 39% boost in revenue. With Chatbots businesses can even generate 30% more leads. (Source: Simplr)

How to Leverage the Capabilities of AI to Stay Ahead of Competition?

So ready to bring the power and capabilities of AI to disrupt the competition? Here we have mentioned the steps to help you successfully utilize AI use cases for your business:

1. Identify the Specific Use Case

Start from the basics, and find the most appropriate use case of AI in your business processes.

You should have a critical look at your business processes and identify the specific pain points holding your business back. For instance, let’s say your marketing team is generating adequate leads, but your sales team is facing a hard time winning those deals. When investigating the reasons you found that your sales team created and sent personalized emails rather than moving a deal forward and closing it.

Now, as you have an understanding of the issue, you can shift your focus to finding the solution. For instance, you can implement applications like Sales GPT which enable your sales team to generate personalized emails based on contextual customer data. Therefore your sales team can focus more on moving deals forward and closing them faster.

Similar to the above example, your business could have any other specific pain points. The best practice would be to identify the specific use case in one department.

2. Define Tangible Metrics

Once the specific use is identified, the next step would be to define tangible metrics such as data source, data quality, and performance evaluation.

These tangible metrics should be defined at the initial stage to achieve the set targets. Also, these metrics will help you to evaluate the performance of the AI solution implemented.

3. Test the Solution

A Proof-of-Concept (PoC) is one of the most suitable ways to ensure that the chosen solution will align with your needs and translate the challenges. It also helps to solve the problems prematurely, so they can be solved before the solutions go live.

4. Involve the Users

Staff are the most likely users of the solution. Therefore the earlier they are involved in the process, the higher the chances of their acceptance and success.

The users can share valuable input over the improvement which is essential for a solution to drive the maximum value for your business.

Final Take

AI is opening up a wide range of opportunities that might have a positive impact on the everyday operations of the business. Underlining the potential and capabilities of AI, and utilizing it is a well-considered way to generate competitive advantages.