What do Siri, Cortana and Watson all have in common? For one, they all work as personal assistants. For the other, none of them are real people: they’re all artificial intelligences, A.I.
There is a growing trend in businesses using smarter and faster programs to manage repetitive and mundane business tasks.
A.I. doesn’t mean handing over control of your business to a computer; we’re not talking SkyNet, here. Instead, it means using highly compatible software with your existing business infrastructure to gather and make sense of large amounts of data, quickly.
In an analysis carried out by Sage, predictions forecast 62% of businesses to use A.I. in some form by 2018, 39% of business owners still don’t fully understand how these technologies can help them.
From creating numerous job listings to sifting through hundreds of résumés to find the best candidate, recruitment can be one of the more mundane and time-heavy challenges of running a business.
“Arya” is just one of the recruitment bots capable of rapidly scanning thousands of social media profiles for your required skills, while other programs can write and monitor your job postings, leaving you more time to interview the best candidates.
With the internet making it easier to “go global” and companies expecting to manage more and more data, A.I. is proving one of the most efficient ways of gathering and formatting enormous amounts of information – or “big data” – and quickly presenting it in intuitive graphs and tables.
Some programs take this one step further and, using the data you input, will write e-mails, product descriptions, and reports for you. In fact, “Quill” is so good at this that its output is considered indistinguishable from a human being.
Have you ever visited a website and gone to use its help system only for the conversation to be powered by a bot answering your questions based on the keywords you use? This is a chatbot. Chatbots are an excellent way of providing your customers with 24/7 support without having to pay an employee to work online at all hours of the day.
A.I. isn’t restricted to online or big data businesses. It can be just as useful at cost-saving and improving yield in manual and traditional business.
Cognitive technology for assessment management is software which works together with the electrical service components in machinery. The A.I. monitors sensor data, proactively orders machinery maintenance and assessment, and, in the event of potential damage or danger, can make real-time decisions, such as shutting down machinery in an emergency.
Facebook continually improves its customer experience, a large part of which is its growing business market. As users spend more of their time on this social media website than any other, it is an essential source of advertising for businesses.
“Insights” is the free A.I. business intelligence which runs alongside your business’ Facebook page. It can gather enormous amounts of useful data, from the age and location of the users that are engaging with your page, to the number of clicks on your website, and even the length of time a user was watching a video.
A.I. isn’t entirely automatic. First, it needs to be made compatible with your existing infrastructure, and you need to be able to specify what data you want and how you want it actioned. However, once the system is in place, it can be enormously effective in improving business performance, freeing you and your employees to focus on more important tasks.
