Artificial intelligence (AI) is turning over a new leaf for traditional businesses. At this point, businesses, especially small ones, can leverage AI to gain a competitive advantage over bigger operations. For example, companies can use AI technology to create a set of tools to perform certain tasks rather than hiring more employees. Today, we want to talk about how AI can help your business and give you some examples of some different applications of AI for business. So, let’s dive in!

How can AI help your business?

Artificial Intelligence can change everything for businesses! It can take the burden of laborious, lengthy, repetitive, and time-taking tasks. Using a Machine Learning or AI model can result in getting tasks done with minimum manual involvement.

Here is a list of ways AI can be used in business:

  • Increases efficiency – With AI, companies can perform many tasks with robotic accuracy. AI models deliver the same quality and output no matter the number of inputs. The lack of human involvement ensures that AI always keeps up with expectations and momentum without unexpected surprises.
  • Speeds-up operations – Humans can only perform activities at a certain speed, and not consistently beyond a certain limit. AI doesn’t share such restraints and can engage in activities such as data analysis, trigger events, and decision-making with immediate effect.
  • Saves costs – Every activity that a business performs through an in-house team costs money. The more activities a company performs, the more staffing is needed in-house. Such hirings can lead to a growing recurring expense. AI offers an alternate solution. Many of the SaaS AI tools for businesses offer a subscription or pay-as-you-go model. This allows smaller businesses to make sure that they are investing their money in something they fully utilize and can discontinue or upscale as needed.
  • Better forecasts & decision-making – Logic and perception have already largely been replaced with statistics and mathematics in many industries. AI- can make such predictions even more accurate, as it is able to take more variables into consideration. A trained Machine Learning model gets better over time, leading to quicker and more favorable decisions.

12 different applications of AI for small businesses

A decade ago, most businesses were quite skeptical about AI. Today, there are plenty of tools that have proven to be successful at leveraging AI to complete a wide variety of tasks. Let’s dive into some of the most popular ways AI is used by businesses.

Content ideas and concept creation

Currently, new SaaS platforms which leverage AI to create content are being introduced every year. For some startups, it is quite hard to focus on content, marketing, and operations. As such, an AI tool for content creation can help significantly.

AI can help save a significant amount of time by suggesting possible ideas and concepts for content creation. AI can use market trends, competitor reviews, and sentiment analysis to come up with such suggestions.

Linkfluence and StoryLab.ai are some of the platforms that can perform the ideation and analysis exercise for the user in a shorter time. With the ideas and concepts suggested, you can just choose one of the ideas and begin the creation.

Writing content for businesses

AI SaaS products that can write content for companies are a booming trend. Natural Language Processing-based AI content writers are at a point where they can research, gather, and deliver a written piece as per the company’s standard expectations.

From catchy titles to blog posts, AI can deliver it all! Here are some of the popular competitors that work towards delivering the best AI-written text: Writerly.ai, Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, and Writesonic. Clearly, this is one of the domains where AI will be prominent.

Personalizing content marketing

AI can be used to improve manually written content. AI models can make content more enticing and personalized for readers. Personalized content for marketing, newsletters, and advertisements can multiply the results for a company.

Generating graphics & visuals

Generative adversarial networks, or GANs, are an AI concept that leverages input data to create graphics and images. Style transfer is another way to merge the contents of one image in the style of another.

Not only can AI come up with branding designs, but it can also create unique images for businesses, sometimes with little to no input from the user. Platforms like Adcreative.ai, Ocoya, and Predis.ai are some examples of AI alternatives for a social media content creation team for businesses.

Sales forecasting

Sales and marketing are two of the most vital business aspects that determine a brand’s positioning and identity.

Backed by strong data from multiple businesses, AI has become known for its forecasting abilities. AI can offer support with sales forecasting so that companies can get a better understanding of which sales to prioritize.

Sales automation tools

Sales automation tools can automate sales process tasks. Tasks that AI sales automation tools can perform include lead prospecting, lead prioritization, email follow-ups, and even automated documentation.

This doesn’t necessarily eliminate the need for manual attention, but it can save significant time and effort. Outreach is an example of a platform that helps with sales automation for businesses. It can identify prospect potential, prioritize opportunities, and recommend the next sales steps.

Social media marketing

It is important for companies to develop brand visibility on social media. Enhancing your brand visibility will result in more sales, awareness, and trust from your audience. The content to convey, the medium to use, and the time to do it are all important variables to take into consideration.

Tools such as Lately, Pattern89, and Phrasee are some of the AI products that can be used to schedule, manage, monitor, and optimize the social media existence of a brand.

Product recommendations

A recommendation engine is an AI tool that is commonly used by e-commerce and product-selling companies. A user’s tastes and search patterns are of major interest to these companies.

Product recommendations are believed to be the best way to increase sales conversions and product upselling.

Sales insights and improvements

Tracking and tweaking business processes is a never-ending task. Through data-driven insights and statistics, AI can verify how the sales team is performing in different areas and help identify any potential areas of improvement.

Companies can make big positive changes just by tweaking their processes a little bit. InsightSquared and Salesforce Einstein are some of the most popular platforms that leverage sales data and AI to transform sales performance over time.

Chatbot and AI assistants

AI can take care of the miscellaneous needs of businesses, thus freeing up people’s time so they can focus on the more important tasks.

Through the use of AI tools, companies can offer instant support and assistance to their clients at any hour of the day. AI chatbots can also be used to suggest the right product to website visitors. AI chatbots and assistants provide multiple advantages, including higher sales, better engagement rates, and quicker client resolutions.

In addition, unlike traditional rule-based chatbot solutions, AI chatbots and assistants can go beyond their pre-existing inputs.

Productive calendar and task management

AI can also be a useful tool for managing calendars. Like a human assistant, an AI calendar tool can add, delete, and modify events intelligently based on the user’s inputs.

Similarly, AI can also be used to manage tasks by prioritization, send reminders, and integrate them with the user’s calendar. There are many tools that leverage AI for these purposes, including Bizzabo, Asana, and Monday.

Product design & development

AI also has a concept called Generative Design which helps engineers create product engineering designs. This helps them build durable, attractive, and out-of-the-box products for their ideal use cases. It can help reduce the development lifecycle for startups and give them an innovative edge. AI can then also be helpful when it comes to quality checking and assurance.

Grow Your Business with AI

Whatever type of business you run, there’s a high chance that AI tools can help improve it! From automating time-consuming tasks, enhancing customer experience, or offering data-driven insights, AI presents endless opportunities for businesses looking to improve their operations or expand their reach.

Despite some challenges, such as privacy concerns and implementation costs, the overwhelming advantages of AI suggest a considerable return on investment. It’s a swift and exciting wave of digital revolution; don’t let your business be left behind. Get on board with AI and watch your business transform and grow beyond measure.