In this fast-paced competitive business world, all small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are facing several operational and financial challenges. Artificial Intelligence is helping them to tackle all these issues through applications like smarter accounting software and fintech services. For this reason, the power of artificial intelligence continues to grow for SMBs.
Even according to a survey by Pega, 33% of consumers think that they are using AI-enabled services or devices while other 77% think they are actually using AI technology.
But have you ever wondered, how your mobile device autocompletes words when you type a message or text?
Or how digital assistant on a website respond to your chat with the blink of eyes?
Well, the answer is - Use of artificial intelligence in business. So, before moving ahead to understand how AI can solve growth obstacles for your small business, let’s know about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in brief.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Artificial Intelligence referred to as machine learning that is designed to react and works like a human. The few activities associated with it are learning, planning, problem-solving and speech learning.
With AI, companies can also automate customer interactions including social media conversations, online chat, and telephone calls. On combining AI and machine learning together, you will see that communicating with customers has become easier than ever.
According to Forrester Research, businesses that use cognitive computing technologies or platforms based on AI will be estimated to earn $1.2 trillion by 2020. At the same time, investment in AI will also get triple.
How AI can Solve Growth Obstacles for small businesses
As Artificial Intelligence has become more popular among companies of all sizes, it is important for small businesses to take advantage of it. Here are some of the major ways adopting AI can help small businesses to solve their growth obstacles.
#1 Speed, Competitive Advantages and Growth Opportunities
The success of SMBs depends on speed to a large extent. It includes the speed of customer adoption, brand recognition, and fundraising. As every business looks for ways to get instant revenue, they need to understand their customers’ needs, address problematic issues faster, and reduce the risks of their business model. From new customers to keeping and expanding existing ones, SMBs must master in every phase. Leveraging AI plays a major role here.
It provides robust growth opportunities along with competitive advantages to SMBs. Also, Artificial Intelligence helps sales representatives to make sound decisions about the best opportunities and prioritizing information across different customer databases. It allows them to understand every minor to major aspect require to engage with customers that help in developing a strong and long-lasting relationship.
#2 Bias Resources and Easy access to Customers Data
Artificial Intelligence helps SMBs to work smarter, get customer insights, predicting outcomes and make better decisions. When the budget is tight, AI helps SMBs to automate monotonous tasks that help them to focus on their crucial tasks especially building a relationship with customers, which is essential for SMBs. AI needs customer and prospects data to deliver results.
With access to third-party data resources and global crowdsourced, SMBs can easily scale their customer data by tapping into buyers behavioral data points to create customers information and data. This helps SMBs to get buyers behavior, identify customers more precisely and to predict their future actions.
According to a study conducted by Qualtrics based on the feedback from 250 marketing leaders, 96% of the businesses expect Artificial Intelligence to handle their repetitive tasks. While 63% think that AI will take over the statistical analysis within the next few years. While AI is important for large companies, it is also important for small businesses that want to achieve the right conclusion for more modest amounts of data.
#3 Expanding Customer Base and Increase Employees Knowledge
In today’s business world, many small businesses face trouble in expanding their customer base. Customer experience, brand awareness and value delivered are the roots of any business in this industry. By using Artificial Intelligence, SMBs can target brand building to the right audience along with increasing the outreaching and expanding their customer base.
Not only this, but AI also helps in increasing employees knowledge. Wondering how? One of the most challenging aspects of a business is to attract expert in sales and marketing niches. AI helps in increasing the knowledge of the employees, allowing them to empower their prospects, customer-facing team, and create informed buying experience, result in closing more deals.
#4 Inspire Your Best Customers and Offer Real-Time Assistance
When it comes to the use of artificial intelligence in business, you will see many benefits of it, especially inspiring and expanding your customer base. Customer service and AI-powered support are the lifeblood of businesses. It can engage customers and send appropriate comments in conversations with quick response in real-time. This plays a vital role in retaining unhappy customers who are planning to switch to another brand.
Artificial Intelligence is also amazing for SMBs that need continuous communication with a high volume of customers. For instance, the transport industry that needs to interact with customers in real-time and provides them updates about their transportation.
#5 Predict Outcomes
Another way AI can solve growth obstacles of your business is with its ability to predict outcomes based on data analytics. This can be quite useful for a company that is looking to invest in the right stock with the right volume. This prediction is quite useful for SMBs.
Conclusion
While SMBs have been embracing the changes brought by Artificial Intelligence (AI), others are quite careful about it. Whether you believe it or not, but AI is here to stay. As a helping hand, it will help SMBs to save their time and resources, making our lives easier and simpler.