Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the dominant topic in technology today, ranging from discussions
speculating on its future developmental trajectory to its current use-cases. While the launch of OpenAI’s
generative ChatGPT product in 2022 brought AI to mainstream attention and has become synonymous
with the term, other forms of AI have already been in common everyday use for some time: Apple’s Siri
digital assistant, launched in 2010, is just one example.
So then what exactly is AI, and how might businesses be able to gain a competitive advantage by
leveraging its power to improve customer experience and streamline existing workflows?
Defining AI
With such a range of potential applications, AI may be more easily defined first by what it is not. Artificial
General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) describe a theoretical future form of AI,
when computers might match or even exceed human intelligence; think of HAL from 2001: A Space
Odyssey. This type of AI would be self-aware and conscious, able to grow its own knowledge and abilities
in the same way a human could.
Current AI technology is instead a natural extension of existing statistical and mathematical methods
that receive inputs and use them for predicting an output. Some of the earliest applications of AI in the
1950’s were playing checkers and translating Russian into English. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess
computer became the first machine to defeat the current world champion chess player Garry Kasparov.
These programs were written to analyze inputs, assign weighted scores to different outcomes, and then
output an “intelligent” result. Even though the final outcome can mimic human intelligence, modern AI
products are still programs written by humans for a specific purpose and using a specific methodology.
Generative AI is one of the most commonly discussed forms of AI today: the “G” in OpenAI’s ChatGPT
stands for “Generative”. Generative models have been used in statistics for years to classify data, for
example to determine whether an email should be treated as spam or not. Given an initial set of training
data, generative AI models then use classification labels to interact with users to produce a desired
output.
As an example, a database is first analyzed by the AI program. Dog pictures are labeled as such,
spaceships likewise, and so on; these labels may be specified by human trainers, or deep learning
algorithms may be used to create its own classification methods that can be corrected or honed over
time. When a user then asks the AI model to produce a picture of a dog flying a spaceship to the moon,
it can match the request with the various pictures in its training database and produce the desired result.
This process can also occur with other media like music and text.
The Business Case For AI
A recent Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council survey from October 2023 found that 75% of
small businesses with a median of 9 employees were already leveraging the power of AI tools in their
operations. Companies with revenues of less than $100k per year still utilized AI workflows 66% of the
time, and among the highest revenue earners AI adoption was as high as 86%. Median investment in AI
across all respondents was just $1,833 per year; in return, AI helped companies achieve a median weekly savings of 13 employee hours. These findings prove that whatever conceptions you may have about
utilizing AI in your business, it is attainable and affordable to leverage AI to increase your company’s
productivity, competitiveness, efficiency and profitability, while also cutting costs in other areas.
Here are ten areas where AI may be a good fit for your business:
Financial Management:
All businesses must pay taxes and track profits, losses and expenses. Most businesses will either hire an
internal finance team or outsource the work to accounting firms, but AI can also help in addition to or
sometimes even replace some of those needs.
Whether you are billing expenses to a client or tracking for internal bookkeeping, tracking expense
receipts can sometimes be a headache. Several AI tools make this process simpler by allowing you to
take a picture of your expense receipts and extracting merchant, date, and line-item expenses for easy
reference and automated reporting.
If your business utilizes a payment portal online or in an app, AI-powered software can sit in the middle
of your site and the payment processor to validate transactions and reduce fraud by using data points
like VPN usage, IP addresses, and transaction amounts.
For startup companies looking to gain a foothold while reducing costs, AI tools can offer a ChatGPT-like
interface to ask niche tax questions and provide quick and accurate answers. Some services even aim to
replace the role of a bookkeeper or CFO by tracking your company finances, making intelligent
recommendations, and positioning your business for success.
Many companies already use third-party tools like Xero and Slack for communication, document storage,
and contact management. AI tools can also integrate with these existing services to enhance their
capabilities.
Email Marketing:
Gaining new customers and keeping existing customers up to date on your latest products and services is
essential for the growth of any business. Newsletters are a tried-and-true method to deliver updates to
potential and current clients, but creating the content, knowing who to email to maximize effectiveness,
and how often to send can be challenging. Some companies wind up hiring a marketing specialist to
help, but AI can also assist.
AI can inspect your existing email lists and help sort out high-value email addresses using metrics such as
email domain and position in their companies. Once campaigns are sent, AI can help track recipient
interactions to determine who your most engaged readers are and who may need special outreach to
gain better traction with. Combined together, AI can help curate a list of effective email addresses for
you.
Sending your communications at regularly spaced intervals may not be the most effective. Whether they
go out once a week or once a month, sending too frequently or too sparsely can negatively impact the effectiveness of your campaigns. AI can track recipient engagement over time and even times of day to
determine the best email schedules.
Cybersecurity:
In the digital age cybersecurity must be a central concern for all businesses and AI tools exist to protect
against every threat vector. From email filtering to website connection monitoring, with greater
sophistication in the tools and strategies attackers are using comes the need to use more sophisticated
cybersecurity protections.
Email filters powered by AI can scan message headers, simulate the opening of attachments, analyze text
in the email body itself, and receive real-time signals from mail servers across the globe to more
accurately determine whether the message is malicious and quarantine it before the recipient ever has a
chance to be compromised.
Even in the realm of antivirus software, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software backed by AI
algorithms can go beyond just checking a file’s digital fingerprint against its database of known viruses to
protect systems from attack. EDR software can examine the behavior of the program or file itself to
detect suspicious actions even if it is a brand-new virus.
Inventory Management:
Managing inventory can be challenging for businesses: keeping too much stock on-hand can be wasteful,
cuts into monthly profitability and uses up valuable storage space, but not keeping enough can lead to
shortages and upset customers.
AI tools can assist with analyzing historical data, customer purchasing habits, and other trends that might
affect demand to help businesses determine the right time to purchase new inventory and in what
amounts. Rather than hiring dedicated staff and spending employee hours keeping track of stock, AI can
do most of the work throughout the production cycle from the time of inventory purchase all the way
until new inventory is needed.
Image Creation:
From company branding material, images for presentations or websites, and even professional
headshots, AI can assist with quickly generating fresh images for your business.
Every company should have a logo that helps them stand out and appear attractive to customers. When
just starting out or desiring a refresh, in the past many companies needed to hire a graphic designer to
create several versions of proposed logos for them to choose from. Even after choosing a design,
different images for letterheads, email signatures, marketing materials, websites, and more also need to
be created. Today there are AI tools that can start with a description of what you’d like your logo to be
and then give you several options to choose from right away.
Social Media Management:
Social media is vital to a business’ ability to expand its reach to more customers, but like email marketing
questions about post frequency, content, and engagement can be difficult to solve with hiring extra help.
Before you consider hiring a social media manager, you may want to explore what options AI services
can offer instead. AI can help recommend the most optimal posting frequency and can be scheduled to
post on your behalf even outside of normal business hours. Content generation and engagement
tracking are also made easier, saving your business time and money.
Customer Service Chatbots:
Many businesses have websites featuring chat functionality, and in the past needed to dedicate internal
staff our outsourced help towards receiving chat requests from site visitors and helping with their
requests. Whether it is sales- or support-related, AI thrives at this type of task as well.
Even if not every chatbot interaction leads to the desired outcome for your site’s visitor, allowing AI to
handle the upfront conversation before potential escalation to a human can still lead to greater customer
satisfaction and reduce employee time spent monitoring and responding to chat prompts.
Project Management:
For many industries projects are a dominant source of revenue and employee time spent, but effectively
estimating costs up front and then managing tasks, deadlines, budgets, and resources throughout can be
difficult. Project-heavy businesses may seek to hire a project manager to oversee these areas, but project
management and AI are also a natural fit with each other.
AI can help estimate costs and completion dates before bidding on a project to provide the client with an
accurate quote. It can also efficiently assign tasks to resources to ensure deadlines are met and that no
single resource is over- or under-utilized. As generative AI models continue to grow and evolve, AI may
also soon be able to help generate task lists based on the objective as well.
Audio-To-Text Transcription:
Attorney offices are one of many businesses which rely on transcribing audio. Typically, a secretary or
other assistant would be the one to listen to recorded statements or attorney dictation and manually
transcribe them using a computer and often specialized equipment and software. Luckily, audio
transcription is another area where AI easily fits in.
Unlike past transcription solutions requiring training using a speaker’s specific voice, modern solutions
can be used with anyone and are as accurate as ever. The usefulness of audio transcription goes beyond
even formal requirements like legal documents, however. In today’s world of video meetings and conferences, AI can also produce immediately useful meeting transcriptions for future reference and
revisiting; searching a meeting transcript for specific content is much faster and easier than rewatching
an entire video.
Content Writing and Creation:
Assuming your business has a social media presence, an email marketing newsletter, a website,
marketing materials, and more, the looming question is always: “How do we generate the content to fill
all of this stuff?” Many recommendations above were specific to and specialized in some of these
specific areas, but sometimes you just need plain old copy in a hurry.
This is what current AI really excels at, from writing a single paragraph social media post to an entire
presentation on virtually any given topic. AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained to understand
natural language to not only understand a user’s request prompt but also produce a convincing result.
While ChatGPT is perhaps the most well-known generative AI chatbot there are now also many
companies offering competing products, and content creation is often a built-in feature of the other
solutions discussed above.
Conclusion:
AI has garnered a reputation as a cutting-edge technology that will be a game changer for many
businesses. While the current state of AI technology is still growing and hasn’t reached that full potential
yet, there are still many opportunities for small businesses to utilize its power to increase efficiency,
productivity, customer satisfaction, and more with relatively minimal investment. For many companies,
the cost offset from reduced employee labor may even save money.