An increasing number of businesses are applying artificial intelligence (AI) to solve some of their long lasting problems. In fact, AI has totally revolutionized the way businesses are run. The introduction of Cloud Machine Learning platforms by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Azure have also resulted in the immense popularity of AI among various types of businesses. AI has been in business for a long time, but not many of you are aware of it. For example, image tagging and spam detection by Facebook and email providers respectively, are the most basic applications of artificial intelligence.
Business Problems Solved by Artificial Intelligence
AI now can help businesses solve some of their more complex problems. Let’s take a look at some of them in the following lines.
1.Financial Analysis
Medium and big companies often have to deal with a large amount of financial data, which requires a lot of time, effort and money. On the other hand, you can use artificial intelligence or machine learning for financial analysis because it can extract accurate historical data, it is quantitative in nature, and has the power to handle a large volume of data.
Currently, companies are using machine learning mostly for loan underwriting, portfolio management, algorithmic trading, and fraud detection. The Future of Underwriting, a report released by Ernest and Young, states that artificial intelligence will ensure continuous and accurate assessment of data. As a result, companies will be able to quickly detect and analyze all the financial nuances and anomalies. The final outcome of the entire process will be improved rules and modules. In the future, organizations can also apply AI to customer services in the shape of conversational interfaces and chatbots, further decreasing their operating cost.
2.Marketing and Sales Department
Marketing and sales are two of the most important departments of any business. It is the job of these departments to understand customers’ behaviors and purchasing habits. However, it is easier said than done. Even some of the biggest companies in the world have failed to make the right predictions regarding what their customers want. Obviously, their marketing campaigns have met with a horrible fate and this is where AI comes to your rescue.
AI is totally transforming the marketing and sales departments by providing them with the customer and lead management tools. These tools help marketing and sales teams to have superior predictive sales intelligence. Similarly, they also help marketers better understand the requirements of their clients through contextually personalized analytics. AI is actually making advertisements and marketing campaigns more interesting and acceptable to the public.
There are many brands such as Starbucks, Amazon, and BMW that are already using AI for marketing and to good effect. As a matter of fact, the Personalized Shopping Recommendation feature introduced by Amazon was one of the very first of its kind. This particular algorithm or program has become even more complex and advanced with the passage of time. It not only includes your past shopping trends, but also considers your browsing behavior and items other customers have bought to come up with new suggestions for you.
3.Appointment and Program Scheduling
Scheduling appointments have always been a headache for the companies. It is a Herculean Task to manually keep a record of every meeting that has taken place in the past or is going to happen in the future. Although, companies have been using popular voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant to schedule appointments yet they have not been able to produce the results they want.
However, you can now employ advanced artificial intelligence techniques which are much more capable of simply remembering past appointments and repeating them again and again. Latest AI programs can read and actually understand your conversations and schedule the appointments for you without any hassle.
Programs like Google Duplex can now detect even the subtlest of differences between conversations. For instance, if you are talking about having an important business meeting, the AI based Duplex can arrange a meeting for you on a specific day, time and place. More importantly, it can negotiate between various appointment slots and choose the one according to your schedule and requirements. It is not only effective, but also a cost-effective way of scheduling your meetings.
4.Medical Diagnosis
A wrong medical diagnosis can have serious consequences not only for the patient, but for the doctor and his organization as well. There are many cases where patients lost their lives simply because of the wrong diagnosis. Artificial intelligence or machine learning to be precise has markedly improved all kinds of medical procedures as well. Similarly, it also helps healthcare organizations take better care of their patient with minimum costs.
Diagnoses made by organizations using AI such as Babylon Health, Bigfoot Biomedical, and CARMAT are near perfect. These organizations are better prepared to predict high-risk patients, readmissions and recommend best medicines, all the while spending the minimum amount of money.
AI has also made it easier for healthcare companies to manage their data. Compiling and analyzing medical records and maintaining past history and similar data are very important for a patient’s recovery. AI bots provide more consistent and faster access to the data they have already collected and stored. Furthermore, robots having advanced artificial intelligence are a perfect choice to do mundane tasks such as data entry and analyzing CT scans, X-rays, and other tests more accurately and quickly.
5.Product Recommendation
Before artificial intelligence became common, companies really struggled when it came to product recommendation. From recommending wrong to totally irrelevant products, companies faced all sorts of problems. For example, customers’ preferences can change at any time. Some companies simply do not have enough data to make the right recommendations. Sometimes, they do have the data, but it is old or totally obsolete. On many occasions, a company’s products are so complex and unpredictable that it is difficult to make any recommendation. This results in angry or alienated customers, which gradually move to your competitors with better recommendation systems. The final outcome is low sales and declining profits.
You can overcome all these problems and create an accurate and reliable recommendation engine using artificial intelligence. AI can correctly predict which of your products your customers are most interested in and more likely to purchase given it has access to a large inventory of products and customers’ purchasing history. The artificial algorithms are well equipped to identify hidden patterns among customers’ behaviors. Subsequently, they categorize items into different groups based on these patterns. Unsupervised algorithms make product recommendations considering all the information they have gathered about a customer. They also motivate him or her to make a purchase.
Once again, Amazon is the biggest exponent of using AI for product recommendations. Facebook and Instagram also use location details with unsupervised learning to recommend certain users to other users. It is a more reliable and cost-effective method of the product recommendation, to say the least.
6.Human Resource Departments
Human Resource is yet another business department that is using AI to its maximum advantage. You must be wondering how you can apply AI to solve problems related to humans. Artificial intelligence is, in fact, going to optimize and simplify talent acquisition. Acquiring the right talent is one of the worst nightmares for human resource professionals. Any wrong hire cannot only have dire consequences for your company but it can also ruin your own reputation.
After all, it is literally impossible to source through thousands of resumes and covers letters to discover the top best candidate for the job. The only solution to this problem is applying a multi-modal contextual extraction framework. Such a framework will take out the long, boring and difficult work of collecting information about the prospective candidates. You will also have more time and of course energy to meet the top candidates in person and learn more about their skills and experience.
In addition to meeting and socializing with the job applicants, the AI will also provide you with the information and the insight you need to make the right hire faster. It is important for a hiring manager and AI to coordinate with each other, forming a sort of a symbiotic relationship. You, as a hiring manager, also need to realize that AI is there to assist you in your routine tasks. It is not your opponent or a threat to you at all.
7. Spam Detection
Spam detection is the earliest and simplest application of AI. Gone are the days when email providers would remove spam using pre-existing rule-based techniques. Nowadays, spam filters have become extremely advanced and multifaceted thanks to machine learning. Modern spam filters have the ability to create spamming rules of their own, making spam detection even more accurate, efficient and effective.
For instance, Google has managed to reduce its spam rate to just 0.01% because of its spam filters. These filters contain neural networks, which are capable of analyzing rules and regulations across a huge number of computers. They can recognize phish messages and junk mail and subsequently, mark them as spam. The use of AI is not limited to spam detection only. Various social media networks are also employing it to identify and filter abuse.
8.Image Recognition
Computers extract information from high-dimensional data and images to produce symbolic or numerical data for various companies to use. The process involves different branches of artificial intelligence, including pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning, and database knowledge discovery. Automobile industry (driverless cars from BMW for example) and different healthcare organizations are already using image recognition techniques. Another possible application of this very technology can be found in marketing campaigns. L’Oreal recently launched a very successful image recognition based marketing campaign titled Makeup Genius, considerably enhancing their user engagement and increasing social sharing in the process.
9.Data Entry
Last but not least, you cannot successfully automate your business processes if you are still having major business problems like inaccurate or duplicate data. You can literally bring data entry errors down to zero by employing predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms. There are many AI programs which naturally process the language and write reports after scanning texts and determining the relationship between them. AI programs continue to make data entry more convenient and quick using all the data discovered by the system.
To put it simply, machines are fully capable of performing data entry and time-intensive documentation tasks. Also, you can detail your workers to more important high value tasks because they no longer have to worry about data management.
Conclusion
We have mostly discussed industry-related problems which AI can solve in this article. It may be difficult for you to replicate them in your own industry. You need to hire highly qualified AI consultants or data scientists to customize AI solutions for your business. The artificial intelligence programs can definitely help a business identify problems and risk and deliver better services. However, the biggest stumbling block for businesses is the availability and quality of the data. Therefore, it is imperative for you to acquire and structure enough data before applying AI to solve your business problems.
