As a business owner or manager, you face the challenges of attracting customers, making strategic decisions, and increasing the business’s profitability overall. While you’ve probably developed a system for this by now, adding artificial intelligence to the mix can make all the difference in the world.
Much has been said about the capabilities of AI since it became mainstream in 2023. But how does it actually benefit businesses?
If you’re still on the fence about adopting AI, here are five proven benefits of artificial intelligence in business that’ll change your mind.
1. Efficiency and Productivity
Most businesses are set up for profit. As such, they continuously create strategies that allow them to judiciously use their resources — labor, time, and capital — in a way that guarantees maximum output.
And that’s what AI precisely offers businesses— the opportunity to spend less capital and labor to achieve more results in less time.
The application of artificial intelligence in business enhances efficiency and productivity in several ways.
One such way is to automate manual, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks like data entry, responding to basic customer inquiries, scheduling, etc. Another is streamlining core business processes like employee resume screening or creating follow-up emails. Applying AI to these processes increases the business’s efficiency and productivity by relieving the employees who would otherwise perform those tasks. Consequently, such employees have more time to take on other vital activities that could directly impact the business’s bottom line.
In turn, AI involvement in core business processes helps minimize the chances of human errors. These AI algorithms can learn continuously and adjust their decision-making processes in light of updated input data. Consequently, they guarantee precision, even in vital business operations like financial accounting and data analysis.
Businesses in the financial services industry are textbook case studies of this benefit. They continuously search for novel ways to reduce costs, improve productivity (especially with back office functions and the cost to serve), and ultimately boost revenue.
For instance, leading global financial services firm J.P. Morgan has been using AI-powered large language models to carry out payment validation screening with AI-powered large language models for over 2 years now. The AI models help the financial service giant reduce false positives and manage queues better. As a result, they’ve improved customer experiences, cut down on fraud, and reduced account validation rates by 15 – 20%.
Absolutely remarkable!
2. Innovation and novel product offerings
Innovation is key to every business’s survival. This means businesses must constantly offer novel and useful products, services, business models, or strategies to gain and maintain a competitive advantage in the market. More importantly, innovation helps businesses adapt and overcome challenges to achieve organizational growth.
However, consistently doing this requires creativity, strong problem-solving skills, and unconventional thinking. Many times, businesses struggle to find the right individuals with this perfect skill combination.
Recent advancements in AI-based technologies have helped businesses reduce the time between ideation and execution of novel ideas. The application of artificial intelligence in business is already advancing innovation efforts and ultimately creating new products and services.
For instance, the BMW Group is already using in-house-developed cloud-based AI innovations to automate and optimize their car production processes. The BMW iFactory uses innovative technologies like Car2X to enable real-time communication between the vehicle and the entire production ecosystem. In addition, the BMW iFactory also carries out visual and acoustic quality inspection with AIQX, another AI-powered technological innovation.
These technologies combine to make BMW releases better and safer cars. As a result, the luxury vehicle manufacturing company maintains an edge over competitors by ensuring its customers get more enjoyment and safety with every BMW release. This impact makes it one of the best examples of artificial intelligence in business processes.
3. Personalized customer experiences
According to Statista, 82% of customers claim they would recommend a business if they had an excellent customer service experience. When customers do this, it significantly reduces the amount the business has to spend on customer acquisition strategies. Businesses love that! Remember, they’re trying to cut costs and boost revenue.
So, how does the use of artificial intelligence in business improve the customer’s experience?
One of the most common ways is personalized customer experiences. Personalized experiences mean tailoring all the touch points of an individual customer to match their specific needs and preferences. They make the customer feel like the business actually cares about them and knows what they need.
Personalized experiences could take various forms, such as product recommendations, customized marketing, and generative AI integration for customer service inquiries, especially on e-commerce platforms. If you’ve ever bought a product that was recommended to you in the “You may also like” section of any e-commerce store, then you’ve probably experienced it.
AI can also help to deliver personalized experiences in other fields like the entertainment industry. For instance, Debut Infotech, an AI development company, helped Markus & Morten develop Frendspire, a personalized recommendation platform that assisted viewers in narrowing the streaming universe to their taste. Friendspire simply wanted to be a platform where friends and families search, share, and save awesome content that they liked personally. And Debut Infotech was able to help them achieve that with AI. As a result, they’ve been able to raise a seed capital of $300K in 2020 and a further $260K in 2021.
That’s how impactful AI can be on customer experiences, even with small businesses and startups, as long as they implement the solutions properly using the right AI development company.
4. Quick data-driven decision-making process
In 2008, American multinational coffeehouse chain Starbucks had to close 600 stores due to a lack of profitability during the economic meltdown. Then CEO Howard Schultz figured the location of these stores had something to do with the profitability issues.
To solve this problem, he decided the company would apply a data-driven approach to selecting new outlet locations. The chain partnered with location analytics company Esri to analyze maps and retail locations with a higher likelihood of success. A decade and a half later, and you know the rest of the story — Starbucks has been waxing strong.
Such is the importance of data-driven decision-making to business success.
In today’s business landscape, decision-makers are faced with complex considerations, time constraints, accountability and scrutiny, and the pressure to match the expectations of various stakeholders and investors. All these constraints further complicate the decision-making process.
However, properly trained AI systems can simplify the process for business leaders by eliminating bias, analyzing vast amounts of data in record time, and forecasting future trends.
AI-driven predictive analytics is one emerging application of AI in business intelligence. This term represents the use of AI models to analyze past data in order to evaluate or guess future occurrences. While predictive analytics has been used in data analysis long before the advent of AI, the addition of AI to the process makes it faster and more efficient. With AI, businesses can get the insights early and position accordingly to reap business rewards.
This fast data-driven decision-making can be applied in the following business aspects:
- Sales: e.g., identifying potential leads, identifying the best times to contact them, and determining the best offers they’re most receptive to based on their purchase history.
- Marketing: e.g., crafting personalized marketing plans using insights gathered from website analytics tools.
- Finance: e.g., predicting future stock market changes using LLM models and using historical transactions to predict future financial situations.
- Customer service: e.g., rapidly creating in-demand products or solutions that boost customer satisfaction based on collected customer data.
5. Cost savings
All the benefits highlighted above help businesses amplify their cost-reduction strategies.
For instance, by boosting efficiency through task automation, businesses can cut labor costs. According to McKinsey’s State of AI in 2024 global survey, the spike in generative AI adoption has seen 50% of businesses experience reasonable cost reductions in human resources (HR) applications. Common applications of artificial intelligence in business sectors include resume analysis, candidate matching, employee performance monitoring, and many more.
Likewise, by driving innovation and powering the release of novel products, AI helps businesses identify new market trends and opportunities.
Most notably, pharmaceutical businesses tend to benefit significantly from AI-enabled workflows. Expert surveys by Statista combined with data from scientific publications reveal that using AI in drug discovery processes can potentially reduce the time it takes to bring a molecule to the pre-clinical candidate (PCC) stage by 40% and a corresponding 30% reduction in costs. Imagine what those savings could do to drug and vaccine prices in the market!
The same situation applies to AI-driven personalized marketing strategies and fast decision-making processes. By reducing labor costs and making accurate predictions, businesses can save costs often associated with trial-and-error strategies and long periods of analysis.
Conclusion
Virtually all aspects of your business can benefit from AI adoption.
Efficiency and productivity can become the order of the day in your business’s sales, marketing, and decision-making processes, to name a few. By undertaking low-value routine tasks, you get to commit your employees to more strategic operations. They can also perform those tasks with more accuracy with AI-driven insights to guide their decision-making processes.
However, to enjoy all these benefits, you need the right implementation. AI is an emerging technology still in its infancy, so utmost care must be taken when integrating artificial intelligence in business processes to ensure compliance with regulatory practices.
More importantly, you want to ensure that humans are truly in charge of the entire process and that the solutions are tailored to your organization. That’s where custom AI consulting services like Debut Infotech comes into the picture. Their end-to-end AI development solutions help you ideate your business’ core AI-related needs and seamlessly integrate them into your existing systems.
Want to enjoy the benefits discussed above?
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