Artificial Intelligence continues to be a huge driving force in providing value and time-saving opportunities to businesses around the world.
It’s predicted that up to $3 trillion, yes you read that right, trillion will be unlocked by various artificial intelligence tools in the marketing and sales industry alone.
It can be intimidating to hear about AI if you’re not familiar with it, and even more confused to as you would actually implement it in your business, or what the benefits would be.
While just based on what you may have heard, you may think that implementing AI into your business model or system would be way out of your budget…
We’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, you may already be using some form of artificial intelligence tool for your business.
In this short guide, we’ll be breaking down an easy three-step process for identifying what areas AI could actually benefit you in, and how to implement and integrate them into your strategy from there.
- Identify Cost Saving Opportunities with AI
Instead of immediately looking for ways that AI tools can help you increase revenue or sales, it’s always best to start from a cost reduction standpoint.
This is not only easier to implement from an AI perspective but will give you a taste of just how helpful artificial intelligence can actually be towards reaching your business goals, saving time, human resources, and most importantly, costs.
The first step lies in identifying areas of your business that could be improved or replaced with AI tools.
How do you do this? What do you look for?
Start by making a list of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that you or someone on your team has to fulfill.
Rank them by the number of resources (either time or costs), the tasks take up.
This not only will give you a jumpstart on identifying AI opportunities. It will also give you a great overview of the actual amount of time and resources certain tasks are taking up. Demonstrating a type of internal audit that few business owners practice regularly, but should.
Unsurprisingly, you may find that a majority of the tasks you listed, take up way too much time each month.
Tasks like inputting data into spreadsheets, manually tagging pictures, optimizing posts, running paid ads, and the list goes on and on.
The good news is, that for repetitive manual tasks like these, there’s an abundance of affordable AI integrated solutions just waiting for you.
- Find “Turnkey” Tools
The next step in your AI journey is finding tools that work “out of the box” per se.
Luckily, at this point, artificial intelligence tools have reached a level of user simplicity that makes it easy for even less tech-savvy business owners to begin to automate those time and resource-draining tasks.
We’ve broken them down into a few categories for you below with one or two examples of each to begin your research.
Everyday AI
It’s actually likely that you’re already using AI without even realizing it.
Google’s Smart Reply feature in Gmail - — Suggests sentences in the body of an email based on the context of the rest of your message.
Hubdoc — Makes it possible to automatically pluck key information from receipts, invoices, and bills, greatly reducing manual data entry.
Grammarly — uses a number of AI techniques, including machine learning and natural language processing, to offer corrections and suggestions to improve your writing in Word, email, and other applications.
Prices: All Free with Options to Upgrade
Chatbots
One quick way to start putting AI to good use in your business is to create a chatbot to interact with your customers — and there are plenty of chatbot platforms to choose from.
Flow XO is one of the easier solutions, offering a “zero coding” interface. It allows you to create chatbots for your website, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and more. Among other things, it can also answer simple questions, streamline customer support, accept payments, gather information, and pre-filter leads.
Price: Start for free, then up to $25/month
Data insights
One of AI’s key benefits is how it can simplify large amounts of data, and the applications you can apply to them.
Chata.ai — It integrates with accounting applications such as Xero and QuickBooks to make it easier and quicker to gain insights. It also allows you to build customized reports and dashboards, easily generate cash flow forecasts, and make natural language queries.
Price: Start for free, then up to $20/month
Automating processes
There are several platforms available that use AI to automate repetitive tasks and business processes.
Microsoft’s Power Automate (previously known as Microsoft Flow) is one of the simpler options. It allows you to build multi-step workflows between hundreds of different types of applications and platforms you’re already using, without having to integrate code.
Power Automate also contains built-in AI capabilities that enable more complex workflows like running sentiment analysis on tweets and pushing results to both external and internal datasets.
Price: $20/month per user
Plan Your AI Strategy
Once you’ve identified the areas of your business that could most benefit from the use of artificial intelligence, and you’ve found tools that can solve your time and resource-consuming tasks, the only thing left to do is integrate them into your business.
Depending upon the tool, this is typically a pretty easy process, and you should be able to see the expected benefit right away, or very soon after implementing.
As with all tools meant to improve your business, it’s important to monitor the progress and efficiency that it’s bringing to your tasks.
After a few weeks or a month of having your AI tools implemented, return to the task list that you made in Step 1 of this guide, and re-do it.
In order to say for sure that artificial intelligence is having a positive impact on your business, either the time or resources (costs) spent on your tasks should have decreased.
No matter what you’re utilizing Artificial Intelligence for, there’s never been a better time to take advantage of this increasingly valuable and more affordable technology.
