Lara Fox, MD, Objective
AI solutions allow organisations to gain insight that can help enhance overall business performance and efficiency. Recent research shows that 1 in 6 organisations have already adopted AI technology, with 79% of people choosing to use AI to help them at work.
There are many benefits to AI, these include support with customer insights and personalisation for marketing purposes, improvement of operational efficiency and automation of processes. AI can also contribute towards optimising sales, and predictive analytics can be used to plan for the future when forecasting trends, enabling a good understanding of customer behaviour and market conditions. With all the support that AI can offer it has become very attractive to decision makers, increasing its implementation to businesses by 145% over past ten years.
How Can Business Owners Implement These Tools
Sales Goals
AI can help businesses automate tasks, boost productivity, enable data-driven decisions with deep insights and ultimately unlock new opportunities. Machine learning models can be built to analyse historical data to forecast trends, detect patterns, and generate actionable insights. The power of AI is its ability to analyse vast amounts of data quickly, enabling businesses to extract valuable insights from text and speech, automate customer interactions, conduct sentiment analysis.
Businesses can improve user experiences with AI-powered chatbots to handle customer queries and voice assistants that improve interactions and improve customer service. AI can work a lot faster, cutting out valuable business time and allowing employers to focus on other tasks. Data analytics allow business owners to see patterns emerging and spot trends. The data insights can then be used to gain further knowledge into clients and customer behaviour which can then be used to leverage sales and personalise marketing efforts.
Many businesses are probably already using AI and analytics tools without realising. For example, looking at the open and click-through rates for their marketing emails to estimate the best times to send communications to each specific business audience. It also allows business owners to craft segments in marketing data, using machine learning to classify customers into segments based on their actions and profile. Natural Language Processing (NLP) can also analyse customer feedback from social media, reviews, surveys to understand and identify areas for improvement.
Financial Processes
Using AI allows organisations to automate operations by streamlining repetitive tasks and processes, reduce the amount of time needed and allowing team members to focus on more strategic initiatives. Tasks like bookkeeping, payroll, invoices and expense management can all be automated. Application Programming Interface (APIs) can also connect different systems together such as Xero or Salesforce enabling the systems to share data and perform analytics to produce valuable data insights. Taking this another step further, businesses can use data analytics to spot errors or inconsistencies in the data being automatically transferred between programmes, saving businesses both time and money.
Forecasting
AI can help forecast trends, customer behaviour and market changes with greater accuracy using historical data. Adding Machine Learning (ML) to databases and web apps used for forecasting enables algorithms to forecast information and enhance inventory management. Machine learning can also be used to forecast demand and optimise inventories. This is not just for large businesses; Microsoft’s ‘Azure Auto ML’ can run 50 machine learning models on data without needing a single line of code making it accessible for SMEs too. It can be linked with Power BI to produce dashboards which allow business owners to visualise the data and use it for reporting. Using data sets, machine learning and intelligence together can help towards making data-driven decisions.
Supply Chain Support
Real-time data and algorithms can support with supply chain optimisation, predicting disruptions and finding any areas of inefficiency or concern. This can reduce the risk of wasting any unnecessary resource. Power BI can also help here by tracking the flow of goods, as well as finances and any additional information across the supply chain which can help businesses with identifying ways to help with operational performance going forward. Trend data from machinery and equipment can also help predict the lifespan of equipment, identifying failures before they occur and in addition reducing downtime and maintenance costs.
Task Management and Logistics Planning
This process can be made more seamless as the automated timesheet retrieval and job allocation data can be collected and held together on a single report. It can also be used for logistics planning, allocation of resources and distribution of staff. Route planning can be delivered using AI technology, taking data from databases and IOT devices such as sensor data, which helps automate allocations. AI development can also identify inefficiencies, reduce manual work and optimise resource allocation through intelligent automation. Furthermore, businesses can use this for quality control and implement validation systems to help maintain consistent accuracy.
Using AI and Data Analytics for Business Growth
Despite being around for some time, there is still a limited understanding around AI and data analytics amongst businesses and the lack of utilisation could be holding many back. With so many options to choose from, it can be difficult to understand what the tools can be used for, however, when the time is taken to gain the knowledge around these solutions it could be hugely beneficial and support long term business objectives.
There are several applications out there that are available to try that don’t require business owners to be experts. Tools such as Microsoft Azure Auto ML suite are easy to use and require low or no code to get started with. Microsoft tools also come with Co-Pilot to navigate people through the process.
The first step to take is to put the data into an application such as Power BI or a similar reporting tool to visualise the data. Once you have this information you can then start to ask it questions. Every business with an accountancy system should be able to try these solutions by connecting numbers and costs to a visualisation tool. This will enable business owners to see any useful trends and patterns emerge.
Being able to use the data combined with other digital tools allows business owners to truly see where their business is at and how it can be streamlined to become more efficient, to keep evolving, continue to improve and keep a step ahead of the competition.
