AI has changed the way businesses operate across industries, enhancing efficiency, decision-making, and customer experience. The impact of AI has been seen over the past years in various industries, from manufacturing to farming. AI has helped improve productivity, reduce repetitive tasks, and bring down human errors by over 80% where implemented correctly. AI business applications are not just limited to chatbots and customer services now, though it is the most prominently used. AI has helped businesses with understanding large data in a simpler visual format, making decisions possible in minutes. For industries like human resources, AI applications have helped reduce sifting through thousands of resumes to find the right candidate in seconds that match the exact requirements of companies. Manufacturing companies have been able to make decisions on maintenance and schedule them, preventing downtimes. AI business applications are evolving, and we could see a lot more over the coming years, but for now, here are some of the areas where AI is helping businesses today.
Customer Services and Support
Humans are very good at communication, and it’s one of the few industries that relied solely on skills that could not be replaced. But imagine a system where the person speaking to you understands the topic but also understands your sentiments. Humans are emotional beings, and we do align with the person who is sitting opposite to us. But in the digital world, we lack understanding of the person’s sentiments while speaking to them online. With AI, you can tailor your chatbots for customer services and support based on the information you provide and also analyze customer emotions from feedback and social media platforms to understand your customers easily. Imagine being able to know the person opposite to you like a friend. Knowing the food they eat, the restaurant they visit, the clothing style they prefer, if they have kids, if they are married, where they work, and what kind of profession they lead. How would you communicate to the person if you knew all these details as opposed to knowing nothing more than their name? With AI, you can tailor your customer service experience by personalizing the experience.
Companies like KFC, Macy’s, AirHelp, Axis Bank, and ING use AI for customer services for various tasks.
Marketing & Sales AI Business Application
Marketing is an integral part of all organizations and the department where most of the budget goes into. Understanding customer behavior is best left to humans, but when it comes to online platforms, it’s hard to understand customers without knowing them, seeing them, and talking to them. With AI, you can now forecast customer behaviors and target your ads accordingly. Imagine being able to tailor your ads for women who are soon to be moms or a professional who is actively looking for a job. Imagine being able to predict if the company you are targeting will expand to a certain industry based on their social media profile on LinkedIn. AI could tailor your ads and personalize your marketing campaigns to increase conversions. While humans can do all this, AI is faster, more accurate, and there is a lesser margin of error.
AI algorithms analyze user data which you already have and acquire data from sources you give them to deliver tailored content and product recommendations. You could also personalize emails for your email marketing campaigns with AI, precisely written for the target customer. Personalization with AI does not just mean including their name in the email address but addressing them based on the information available and crafting content precisely the way a human would.
Ai business Applications in Human Resource and Recruitment
May it be a human resource and recruiting company or an HR department in a medium to large organization, sifting through thousands of resumes to find the right candidate is often a nightmare. It takes time and there are chances of errors. You may miss out on the right candidate and choose a lesser-qualified professional when you could have gotten a better person to recruit. AI in recruitment can help with screening candidates for the first and even second levels. AI screening can start with shortlisting the resumes to find the right candidates based on qualifications, age, and experience. Once AI identifies the top 10 or 20 candidates, you could further shortlist them for an AI-based test for which a link can be provided to the candidate.
AI-based recruitment tests are complex and are based on expertise-based progress. If a candidate answers a question correctly, they are provided a more complex question to solve, and if they do not, the question moves to another subject altogether or is shifted to a branch in the same level. The scores will determine if the candidate will attend a personal interview or not.
Imagine being able to take out 70% of all recruitment processes with AI as your HR professional. AI is not limited to recruitment alone. While AI screening is one of the most time-saving processes, employee engagement analysis, assigning employee feedback, and understanding the engagement and sentiments of employees allow HR professionals to address concerns proactively in your establishment.
Data Analysis and Insights
Businesses are driven by information, but too much information is often challenging to manage and derive insights from. Imagine having 30,000 pages of data to sift through and come up with a pattern based on the content from those pages. Big data has always played a major role in businesses and their performance. Data analytics has been helpful for overall business and departments. For marketing, it is important to find trends when a particular product sells and when they have a moderate sale. This could be seasonal or based on events. Another example is finding the sentiment of a product in the market after a campaign that spans over 3 months. The information could be huge. Analysis of data with AI makes these possible. With business intelligence, you can find patterns in the information, and it does not matter if you have a large dataset or a small one. Providing information and insights based on these data and finding precisely what you want can be easy with AI-driven business intelligence.
Another scenario, especially in the manufacturing industry, is the use of AI in predictive maintenance. Over the years, the use of IoT with AI has enabled various companies like XYLEM to save millions in equipment costs and downtime by using AI for predictive maintenance. AI, coupled with IoT, can analyze your equipment and report the status of equipment and fluctuations which indicate the requirement for maintenance. With predictive maintenance, companies can reduce the cost incurred due to downtime. Regular maintenance, before time, can increase machine life. Predictive maintenance, especially, is useful to know when machinery does not require maintenance, preventing companies from spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on maintenance that machinery does not require!
Ai business Applications in Supply Chain Management
Large or small, organizations are scaling rapidly with products reaching millions of miles to end users from a manufacturing center on the other side of the world. With AI supply chain management, you have the ability to track inventory, predict requirements, and ship products accurately based on forecasts. With AI-based supply chain management systems coupled with IoT, you can not only track your product from manufacturing units to end users but also analyze the trends in product sales, inventory, and optimize your production based on these data. You can now divert your inventory to the areas which have more requirements and reduce wastage.
Logistic optimization with AI has improved routing and delivery times, cutting costs and improving efficiency. Taking the shortest route, finding the best delivery time, etc., are often volatile, and with the latest information, you could allow AI to give you options on the best route to take for delivery. Talk about improving customer satisfaction!
Ai business Applications in Financial Services
Banks and financial institutions can benefit from AI integration in understanding patterns of fraud detection and preventing fraudulent transactions. While online banking has automated many processes, security is often a concern in these systems. The use of credit scoring and analyzing financial behaviour, credit history, etc., to assess the creditworthiness of a client is also crucial where loans are dispersed. AI can help with these areas too and has been effectively implemented in various financial institutions.
Ai business Applications in Healthcare
The use of AI in healthcare has evolved a lot, with a separate section of AI business applications dedicated to the industry. With AI, doctors have been able to diagnose patients based on symptoms, genetics, the history of the patient, and their lifestyle. Today, AI can help personalize a treatment plan tailored to the patient rather than providing generic solutions. When it comes to diagnosing patients, AI helps doctors with image recognition and patient data analysis, suggesting the possible conditions. Doctors often take the role of analyzing data and correcting the information provided by the AI systems, fine-tuning the system to provide and access more information based on the information provided.
Ai business Applications in Retail and eCommerce
AI has evolved to help with visual search already on Google-based systems. Google Lens is powered by AI systems to find relevant products based on image search. AI can also tailor your eCommerce system to manage inventory, optimize stock, and predict the possibility of demand. This prevents overstocking or shortages. Dynamic pricing is also a great feature you can provide on eCommerce stores. You can now adjust the price of a product based on demand and competitor pricing, setting a minimum and maximum price. You can set a price automatically based on customer behaviour to maximize profitability. Imagine providing a deal to a prospect to ensure the customer purchases the product right away because you ensure the price is lower than the competitor and your profit margin is set to the maximum level. What’s even better is that you can tailor the message and personalize it to ensure that the end user is provided with a time-limited deal with the best price with AI.