How Small Businesses Can Embrace the Benefits of AI

For the small business, cutting costs or otherwise increasing the value that their technology can provide is an important consideration. To accomplish this, many businesses are now turning to AI-enhanced automation. Let’s see how they are doing so, and how it helps to make their operations more productive.

Customer Service

Many industries rely on their customer service as a major selling point, capitalizing on the opportunities that their marketing efforts generate. Artificially intelligent tools are now being implemented by many to help these businesses with both aspects to help improve their sales rates.

On the marketing side, AI can help to add a personalized touch for the audience. This touch has been established as key to making any marketing efforts more effective, with 96 percent of marketers believing that greater personalization leads to increased trust. Of course, this kind of personalization would be prohibitively expensive, were it not for AI. By using automation, your customers can all have a profile generated for them that outlines their interests, with notifications and other marketing materials pushed to them during advantageous times.

Where AI really shines, however, is as a customer support tool. While critical to a business’ continued success, customer support typically offers little—and more frequently, no—opportunities to produce more revenue. By utilizing AI, businesses can help to make their customer support-related interactions much more efficient. Implementing an artificially intelligent chatbot can help assist customers with their issues, keeping your employees free to work on their other tasks while your customers may find their own answers independently.

Cybersecurity

Any business in operation today needs to seriously consider their cybersecurity, as the rise in digital operations has led to a concurrent rise in scams and hacking attempts. Furthermore, many cybersecurity experts and companies appraise the damages from the average data breach to be in the millions of dollars, more than most small businesses can cover through their productivity and liquid assets.

Therefore, it makes sense that AI would make an appearance in cybersecurity solutions like endpoint protection and threat intelligence, among others. If AI can identify data patterns that lead to cybersecurity incidents, the more capable these systems will be at preventing them. This is precisely why an unprecedented number of businesses are turning to AI for cost-effective risk mitigation.

Finances

Finally, we must acknowledge the fact that money makes the world—and the businesses on it—go round, so cash flow problems can quickly grow into operational deficits. These problems aren’t exactly rare, either. One study found that cash flow became a major concern for over 60 percent of small businesses over the year and a half before… not exactly a surprise, given the events going on today, but still extremely concerning.

Fortunately, today’s businesses now have access to solutions that use AI to analyze their financial history and make cash flow predictions going 90 days out. As a result, business challenges can be anticipated and planned for more accurately, allowing proactive action to help solve these problems before they happen and inform a company whether a new hire is a wise decision in the moment.

There are many ways that AI can benefit your operations, especially with the help of BNMC. Reach out to our team at (978) 482-2020 to figure out how it would best serve your needs.