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• March 9, 2021
• By Doug Saunders
• Technology
• ai , artificial intelligence , business , competition , corporate , decision management , speech recognition , technology

10 Ways AI is Helping Your Competition

AI, or artificial intelligence, is not a new concept. As early as the 1960’s, the idea of computers that become self-aware and pose a threat to humanity started surfacing in technology and science fiction circles. While nothing as fanciful (or advanced) as the Terminator exists today, AI has become a reality. Many businesses are getting ahead with the competitive edge that using artificial intelligence brings. If you haven’t kept up with current machine learning trends and what artificial intelligence has to offer, read on.

1. Speech Recognition

The most popular and widely used form of AI assistance is speech recognition. When you call a business now, you are directed to a robot answering machine who will serve as your operator. You guessed it, now with machine learning capabilities.

Machine learning models are applied to these systems so they can recognize speech patterns. With time, programs designed to “speak” to people will become more efficient at understanding human speech and vocal patterns. Eventually, programmers will be able to use this new “understanding” to write more complex responsibilities into the system. This would leave less room for error and the ability to solve more issues at any time without your team’s involvement.

2. Virtual Agent Creation

If you don’t have a website in 2021 as a business owner, you’re beyond late. Technology moves fast. Suppose you’re a business owner not staying up on recent trends in AI. In that case, you can fall behind just as dramatically as those companies without a website that couldn’t be digitized in time. Remember Blockbuster?

Suppose you don’t have some way for potential customers to make inquiries easily online. In that case, you might be missing out on potential leads. Even worse, you could lose customers because they can’t find their way around a website, resolve a problem, or make a purchase without picking up the phone, which a great majority of people 18-34 years of age don’t want to do.

Virtual Agents and chatbots have become a common addition to many websites for this reason. Although some might do little more than help customers locate specific FAQs, the trend leads to all business sites having a virtual agent to assist with scheduling or information intake. At the very least, customers feel like your website is engaging. At best, AI can help with resolving customer issues while reducing labor costs.

3. Decision Management

What do you do with all the data you’ve gathered? You aren’t the first to wonder. Decision management is one of the most prominent uses for AI in the business world for a reason. All the information those virtual agents and other AI software bring in still has to be sorted so that a business leader can take action with it.

No surprise, AI does that too.

While some companies drown in their data lakes, other businesses have taken the time to change into customer-centric cultures with stride and build forward-thinking, data-efficient business structures.

4. Product Design

Artificial intelligence offers a massive boost to companies who design or redesign new and existing products. Imagine that you have a new widget for your market. Rather than traditional product design, where feedback is post-production, and the ease or fun of usability can require a lot of thinking, AI can utilize the data about how people use a certain kind of product and build upon that information.

For outliers in product use, your team usually has to sit and brainstorm to plan for those extremes. On the other hand, AI can use behavioral data to predict those issues, allowing your team’s creative focus to thrive and help users handle these occurrences.

Even whether your widget launch will be a success or not can be predicted with a machine learning analysis.

5. Fraud Prevention

Captchas, banking software, and blockchain technology are all spaces where AI fraud prevention has made considerable leaps in online security. Where once user access to a banking system could be breached if a user was a victim of stolen or hacked information, now banks can use AI to produce tokens or verification keys for two-step authentication.

This is a crucial step for any business owner who carries any amount of personal customer data. Some of the largest tech companies, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are continually battling regulatory and civil lawsuits on the grounds of information use.

Facebook has been fined millions of dollars for personal data mishandling; Twitter and other similar companies have been sued for data breaches resulting in stolen personal data. Banks eat the loss if they guarantee fraud protection and information is stolen, and it happens all the time.

Without utilizing AI fraud prevention software, the liability your company faces is that much higher in this very technical age, and for what it can cost to not have protection, you’re taking an unnecessary risk.

6. Robotic Processes Automation

When the average person thinks of AI, their mind might go to the precision and dexterity AI has brought to the field of robotics

Mining operations are much safer and more efficient with AI. production has increased because of it. Automotive manufacturers have progressed to automation over the last few years and have continued to be a leading industry in showcasing the capabilities of AI. Robotic automation integrates production efficiency, customer behavior, and product specs into the machines that will then do the work while gathering more data during the building process.

7. Human Resources

That AI boosted decision-making software can and has applied exceptionally well to the HR departments of many companies. If your company suffers from high turnover rates or recruiting new talent has been a struggle, it may be time to utilize some of the AI tools available to gain the upper hand on the competition.

Finding a specialist can be as simple as an online search on some of the right machine learning integrated platforms. Skills, experience, and location can all be specified, and the algorithms do all the heavy lifting.

8. Marketing and Sales

AI and the marketing industry are infamous for both destroying traditional marketing techniques and being the cause of massive changes in the way society views personal information. 

Bulk user data, customer interests, and behavior information, and market research is an industry worth over $75 billion a year.

Information that your company collects can be sold to other marketers (with the proper legal measures in place) and optimized to your specific business needs. The guesswork related to the target audience is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

9. IT Management

IT departments are notoriously backed up. If your own IT team spends more than 40% of their time managing, installing, and building data and data infrastructure, you are wasting precious time that your team could apply to more business-critical work.

As AI works gather and disseminate business data, the beneficial side effect of this is that your IT people can now keep your systems running smoothly, reduce system downtimes and provide critical insights to the business from a technological standpoint that keeps your company on a technological edge. This is much preferable to continuing to tread water as the distance between companies that use their data well and those that can’t keep up grows.

10. Finance 

Perhaps nothing has been impacted by AI as dramatically as money and our relationship with it. Banks now have extensive models and analytics that help them consider fraud risks, credit analysis, and complicated market computations and forecasts. 

Blockchain technology with AI has created new financial infrastructures that threaten even these advancing but older banking models.

In Conclusion

If your company has neglected to review how you manage data, what your plan for future data management will look like, or is hesitating to move forward to a platform with AI technology, don’t delay too long. This technology may still be early in its use, but it won’t be long before AI is everywhere as it has already taken hold.