Artificial Intelligence and the future of business
Business Innovation - How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Business
From marketing & sales, IT, and HR to customer experience and even finance, Artificial Intelligence has an unprecedented impact on each of their ability to drive measurable results in moving consumers along their journey. From brand discovery to interest, to emotional connection, to action.
There’s no question that we’ve set ourselves on a path toward technologies that will alter many of the tasks and activities that require our human brains today. Its promise: less human error and more time for creativity due to the elimination of mundane tasks and endless virtual assistance.
Today, business innovation and AI seem to naturally have a symbiotic relationship. In customer service, for example, chatbots are now interacting with online customers to improve customer service. In HR, Artificial Intelligence is being used to speed up the recruitment process, and in marketing, AI-powered tools are increasingly used to personalize the customer experience.
Though when we think of the history of business, its often a history of new, popular trends, things you're told you should have to make it. In the end, some of these things don’t always live up to the buildup.
This is what can lead business owners to become reluctant to embrace new technology. They arrive at the “show me don’t tell me” approach. Which is understandable, but it’s also important to be open to actually see evidence of when the technology is actually “showing you” that you can benefit from it. Despite common fears surrounding the impact of Artificial Intelligence on employment, AI is here to stay.
Artificial intelligence isn't just for huge companies too—small or medium-sized businesses can also harness the power of AI to maximize the ROI of their marketing efforts. A good example is looking at chatbots. A simple entry point for smaller companies to see how AI interacts directly with users on their websites.
Here are some great thoughts from Simon Morris, the Senior Director, Campaign Marketing, Consumer and SMB, at Adobe on what he thinks of AI impacting businesses:
A study late last year by Weber Shandwick revealed that 55% of CMOs across five global markets think AI will transform the marketing landscape even more than social media has, and nearly six in 10 believe that companies will need to compete in the AI space to succeed.
The first is around personalization. The demands from customers for a more personalized relationship are ever-increasing, which means marketers are under intense pressure to produce quality and relevant content, at scale, in a consistent manner. AI should speed this up considerably by making connections between certain events and how people react to them. AI will be able to help marketers learn what a customer wants when a certain action takes place and recommend a personalized reaction or piece of content, engaging them at the right place and the right time.
The second area is around data and business alignment. I doubt you would find anyone who would say that aligning the business—particularly sales and marketing in a B2B environment—is not important. But getting multiple business areas to work together is easier said than done. This is where AI could help. By analyzing data from across the whole business, it could, say, recommend actions that the sales team should take based on what the marketing team has already done and what the business goals are. It will be able to constantly adapt and react to what separate areas of the business are doing and continuously provide personalized feedback.
Now, AI is one of those things that has been demonstrating its worth for a while now, but that still might seem more talk than help. Microsoft is a great example of a company that has invested a great deal of time and effort in advancing its use of AI technology, to benefit you and what your business needs to succeed.
Here are a few ways using Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 can help your company see the impact of AI:
1. Personalize selling
As AI becomes more proficient at analyzing and interpreting data, it can track individual buying patterns and help create individualized Marketing outreaches. By anticipating what customers want and offering it to them before even they realize they need it you will sell more and maintain your customers longer.
2. Better customer assistance
AI allows you to utilize smart bot technology that can assist customers with frequently asked questions faster and better than human customer service agents can. By providing better service you keep your customers’ happier and happy customers are repeat customers. After all, customers who have a good experience with a company are more likely to want to share that experience with others, both online and offline.
3. Mining data
The one thing that AI does really well is finding patterns in customer behaviour through data that are not easily identifiable to the naked eye. While you’re deep in the weeds of running your business, you might not have the time to truly evaluate whether what your doing is effective. With AI technology you don’t have to do the digging. Instead, you can see what the data shows in easy to understand dashboards that show a real time, 360-degree view of your business.
Conclusion
To summarize, remember that AI is not here to replace all of our existing processes: it is here to augment and improve, where necessary, and to help us work smarter.
AI can help gather and analyze data quicker than people can – and it can work alongside people much like any effective tool. It can also eliminate or significantly reduce mindless and repetitive tasks and bolster productivity. The use of AI in business is certain to continue at pace. Use it to improve your standard business processes, streamline strategic output and remove the guesswork from your decision-making. Embrace the future.
This is just a taste of the ways that Microsoft AI can drive your business forward. Ask us today what Dynamics 365 solution is best for your business.