How Artificial Intelligence Will Benefit Your Startup?

Apr 4, 2018

Artificial intelligence is an intimidating concept for most small business owners. 61% claim their businesses just aren’t ready to incorporate such a seemingly complex technology.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Artificial intelligence programming doesn’t have to be as complex as Hal 9000 or the Terminator, and there’s no reason to be intimidated.

Over the past couple of decades, savvy startup owners have begun to apply artificial intelligence programming to almost every aspect of their businesses. And if you want to compete in today’s business climate, you need to do the same in your own startup.

Keep reading and we’ll tell you about all the different ways artificial intelligence can benefit your startup.
 

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be able to speak and it certainly doesn’t have to be a cyborg. Basically, it’s anything artificial that can analyze and react to its environment in intelligent ways.

That could be something as simple as a chess-playing computer or an online chatbot.

In the context of your small business, AI will help you learn about your customers and clients, complete menial tasks, and make smart decisions.

It won’t radically change the way your business works, but it will make your business radically more efficient.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming for More Efficient Lead Qualifying

Incorporating artificial intelligence into your sales strategy can make a huge impact. It’s estimated that the average sales team spends 80% of their time qualifying potential sales leads and only 20% of their time closing leads.

But artificial intelligence can do virtually all of that lead qualification for you, allowing your sales team to spend 400% more of their time closing leads. Now that’s efficiency.

Programs such as Conversica respond to clients in real time and ask them the relevant questions to determine if they’re a qualified lead. Once the AI gathers enough information to determine that the lead is indeed qualified, a human salesman takes over to finish the job.

All the lead qualifying goes on in the background; a huge efficiency boost.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming and Intelligent CRMs

If you really want to improve your sales game, intelligent CRMs are the way to go. CRM software (customer relationship management software) allows you to organize all the information about your customers in one location.

Salesforce, the leader in CRM, recently released Einstein AI, which integrates artificial intelligence programming into their CRM. Einstein AI will analyze all your interactions with customers–including phone conversations, emails, and social media posts–and adjust its marketing and sales behaviour accordingly.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming for More Efficient Customer Service

AIs can also automate customer service responses. A lot of customers are going to complain about the same issues, and an AI can give quick automated answers to these common complaints.

As time goes on, your AI will learn how to solve more and more of your customers’ issues, which means you’ll need fewer customer service agents. This is the beauty of artificial intelligence: it learns as it goes. Eventually, it’ll be better at solving your customers’ problems than you are.

AI can also use sentiment analysis to improve your customer service response. Sentiment analysis is a technique in which AI analyzes pieces of written language to determine the emotion of the author.

This is incredibly useful when sifting through large quantities of customer inquiries. Sentiment analyzing AI will read all of those customer inquiries instantly to determine which customers are the most upset and in most need of attention.

Ideally, you’ll address every customer inquiry, but sentiment analysis gives you a shortcut to determine which are the most pressing.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming for Marketing

Most marketers don’t have a well-defined marketing strategy. They simply churn out marketing material and hope that some of it influences potential clients. This leads to a whole lot of marketing waste.

Artificial intelligence based marketing platforms such as Acquisio manage your marketing materials across a range of channels, from Adwords to Facebook to Twitter. These platforms will analyze the effectiveness of each area of your marketing strategy and adjust accordingly.

More advanced AI can even predict what your customers are going to want before they want it. By analyzing their online behaviors, these AIs can make a comprehensive profile for your customers, and advise you about what kind of products they might be interested in. This allows for incredibly effective targeted advertising.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming for Competitive Intelligence

Analyzing your competition is time-consuming and complicated, but it’s extremely important if you want to stay ahead. Luckily, there’s AI for that.

Artificial intelligence based tools such as Crayon will track your competitors’ activities across a variety of channels and give you comprehensive reports describing their business strategies. In addition, these AIs can find weaknesses in your competitors’ products, so you can fill the gaps and win customers.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming for Website Design

There’s even AI that helps you design your website. The tool Bookmark, along with their software AIDA, uses artificial intelligence programming to design a website from scratch. You simply put in some basic information and out pops a unique web design.
 

Artificial Intelligence Programming for Human Resource Management

Artificial intelligence is changing the way human resources departments hire new employees. By analyzing employee profiles and performance, AIs can find common characteristics of successful employees.

This information is then used to analyze future employee profiles and inform hiring decisions, helping you to find the perfect employees for your startup.

Once the employee is hired, AI can even watch their behavior to look out for warning signs of slipping performance.

As you can see, there aren’t many parts of your startup that won’t be improved with the application of artificial intelligence.

But don’t stop there. Head over to our blog to read about more ways to improve your business.

 


 

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