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Artificial intelligence has gone beyond being a tech industry buzzword.
This advanced technology allows companies to automate repetitive tasks and processes, gain a deeper insight into their customers' preferences, and make data-driven decisions.
Still, many small business owners think that AI belongs to the realm of science fiction or, at best, that it's a hefty investment that only big players can afford.
The truth is that businesses of different sizes can leverage AI to boost their growth.
Here are some of the most common use cases to give you some ideas on how to leverage artificial intelligence.
Improve customer service
86% of people say they're willing to pay more for exceptional customer experience.
It's worth mentioning that 90% of customers emphasize that an immediate response is crucial when they have a product or service-related question. In this case, "immediate" is defined as up to 10 minutes.
Given that every support rep can handle only one caller at a time, it's clear that your existing customer service team is very likely understaffed.
Luckily, there's an affordable way to cut employee costs and maximize your team's availability to customers. Instead of hiring more human reps, you can implement conversational AI chatbots on your website. These algorithms are available 24/7, thus allowing customers to reach out at any time they need help and get answers to their questions right away. As a result, you’ll provide a great customer experience and boost engagement on your website.
Customer-facing chatbots work particularly well when it comes to dealing with frequently asked questions. If you analyze the calls your team usually gets, you'll come to a conclusion that a huge percentage of those boil down to your business hours, availability of a particular product, or setting up a solution you sell.
Such questions are relatively easy to answer, but they end up taking up a lot of your team’s time that could be spent on more complex tasks and growing your business.
Streamline Content Creation
Content is a vital ingredient of every successful marketing strategy, and you should pay close attention to your content creation process.
This means producing a lot of high-quality content that will add value to your prospects and customers. However, as you know, it's easier said than done.
According to some stats, smaller blogs that want to generate organic traffic should publish 3-4 new blog posts a week. And this process can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Although artificial intelligence still can’t beat humans when it comes to content uniqueness and creativity, it can be used for speeding up content creation tasks.
For example, Open AI's GPT-3 powers different apps capable of generating content. This technology, supported by machine learning and natural language processing, still can't work on its own.
It lacks critical thinking, which means that it can't churn out meaningful and relevant blog posts from start to finish. But it can be of tremendous help to content writers and strategists, as it's capable of doing the legwork such as creating blog post outlines, conducting research, whipping up drafts, and repurposing your existing content.
Optimize the Hiring Process
Picking the right people for the job is one of the most important HR tasks.
A traditional hiring process is complex. There are numerous job postings and descriptions to come up with, sift through a huge volume of applications, short-list candidates, and interview them.
Your HR team has to overcome many challenges to identify applicants who are the right fit. For example, if they fail to compose a job description properly, it won’t resonate with and attract candidates suitable for the job. After that, checking every application to check whether it matches job requirements can last hours or even days.
AI can help you speed things up.
You can take advantage of AI-powered tools to help you create high-quality job postings containing relevant keywords and phrases that will resonate with top talent.
This step is usually overlooked during the recruitment process, which is a big and costly mistake. Namely, a well-composed job posting that targets highly-qualified and skilled candidates will capture their attention and get them to apply.
The next obstacle is going through the applications and making a shortlist. Thanks to big data processing, AI is capable of scanning thousands of resumes and applications and easily identifying the right candidates.
Candidate interviews are another critical stage of the hiring process.
Candidate interviews are another critical stage of the hiring process. AI assists HR professionals in analyzing interview recordings and detecting subtle cues that are hard to notice with the naked eye. This can be especially helpful when you hire remote employees.
By observing and interpreting body language, artificial intelligence can spot some unusual behaviors and determine whether a candidate is lying during the interview.
Improve Cyber Security
Over the past few years, we witnessed the creation of highly sophisticated malware and viruses by cybercriminals. In 2020, there were 4.8 million identity theft and fraud reports, which is 45% more than in 2019.
For this reason, there's the need for solutions that can identify these threats that take advantage of security errors and vulnerabilities in advance and prevent them.
The financial and e-commerce industries can greatly benefit from AI when it comes to this. For example, trained AI algorithms can spot unusual patterns of financial transactions and alert human auditors to pay attention.
AI can also pinpoint areas in which organizations should have a policy or make procedural changes to facilitate regulatory compliance.
Implementing AI won't necessarily break the bank. It's a worthwhile investment that will help your business thrive.
Published by Michael
a year ago 
