Reasons to Adopt AI in Business and Steps to Make it.
In the tech world, I can’t make a step without bumping into some news about Artificial Intelligence. Everyone is speaking about it. The AI industry grows year after year, becomes more affordable, and there are no signs of stopping.
This technology has impacted many industries. A lot of businesses adopted AI in their workflow and reporting operation costs being cut, revenue growing, business processes going more smoothly than before. All of it happens meanwhile other businesses are just thinking about adopting AI in their business process while watching AI delivering value for their competitors’.
Let’s speak about delivery more, though. I love when delivery happens fast. It’s a great deal when a package arrives as soon as possible.
I suppose the same thing believes UPS, a US based delivery company. They have been searching for ways to use machine learning (ML. Essentially it’s AI) to speed up the process of package delivery. Their ORION (On-road Integrated Optimization and Navigation) system is one of the most advanced navigation systems in the world. It uses a tremendous amount of data to ensure drivers have real-time navigational information that optimizes their route. That alone saves the company millions of miles per year. Which means it saves hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on operational cost.
UPS already uses AI for their benefits and continues to implement new artificial intelligent systems to ensure that their business operates at the most optimum.
This lead to one revelation
Previously, companies did not have any presence on the internet; they essentially didn’t exist. Nowadays, companies who do not use the power of AI to improve their workflow efficiency and customer services would cease to exist in the near future.
Reasons to Implement an AI.
Desire to remain competitive while seeing your business competitors adopt alternative ways of operating a business is good on its own.
But I believe there should be concrete reasons the company may consider adoption of an AI in the work process. Understanding the benefits that AI automatization could bring is important for making the most of its technology and not wasting time and efforts aimlessly working on an extensive project.
Eliminating Bottlenecks
Bottlenecks, any businesses have points which slow down the growth, staggers business processes, and as result make clients unhappy. A lot of things may become the bottleneck for business. Too many processes to juggle will make employees miss a deadline. Tedious paperwork could delay payment, delivery of services, or delay supplies’ arrival. Endless meetings over what next step to make and mess in organization structure could cost thousands of dollars in losses.
Adoption of Artificial Intelligence meant take over repetitive task and speed up tedious task that simple in nature but eat staggers up a lot of time. This free up company employees to do more important job and brings actual value to the company. In fact, more than half of companies report the growth of productivity after they’ve implemented an AI in their workflow.
Customer Handling
Improving work processes by cutting out bottlenecks already means that you have an edge, but that is not all. Companies could improve the quality of interaction with customers or streamline the process when it goes for common requests. This is achievable because of Artificial Intelligence improvements in understanding human emotions, behavior, and interactions with them.
One way AI could help companies with customers is sales. Let’s pretend that we already adopted software that helps us recognize the emotions of potential buyers. Company sales manager would have a conversation with a customer but something would go wrong and the customer decided not to make a purchase. Now, when the manager has a little of free time, they could go through interaction with a customer, when either it’s a video feed or record of voice. This record will help pinpoint when thing get wrong and workout mistakes in their approach to customer. Next time when a similar situation happens, the manager will try another approach which in that instance could may lead to sealing the deal. I wish that would be the thing back when I was working as a sales agent.
Another way AI could help with clients it’s taking out the burden of handling most common and repetitive situation in business. This achievable via chatbots. Company can entrust this software handling simple common questions that a customer may have. This free up time of employees to handle for complex requests or issues that clients may have.
Income Growth
Most pleasant for any enterprise reason to adopt any technology or decide is income growth. Adoption of Artificial Intelligence may lead to a decent growth of companies’ bunk accounts. It’s achieved in two ways. Companies can cut operational costs or increase revenue. Both are by-products of the two reasons above.
Increased efficiency of company business processes means that there is a less waste of resources. As we established, AI is good at making work efficient. That means AI is effective in cutting the operational cost. Because of increased cost efficiency, companies may invest those free funds for their growth, which means the edge over competitors.
Improved client handling may lead to growth in revenue. Customers don’t care about the company or brand that provides the services or goods. But they care about speed, precision, quality, and that manager was nice to them, heard them out, and solved their issue. Improving client handling may lead to those customers becoming a returning one and on top of that they may recommend the company to their friends, which means new clients and revenue growth.
Things to Consider before taking actual steps.
Now, weaponized with the desire to remain competitive and understanding the reason behind adopting Artificial Intelligence, it’s time to make first steps to making it happen. Studying and Strategizing.
Know Your Tech.
Artificial Intelligence is a vast industry. There are a lot of things to know about the subject, what is Data Science, under the umbrella of which falls AI, then Machine Learning, Deep Learning and so on. There is no need to have deep knowledge of each subject, but knowing common things about it won’t hurt when you make a plan of implementing a new technology.
Going through a couple of blog posts, white papers or short courser that introduce the industry would be a great idea. Here some resources that may be useful to make acquaintance with the topic.
Which Process Needs AI
With basic knowledge of AI in the pocket, the next step would decide which part of a business really needs optimization and which one of them would yield the most benefits of such an act. That is relatively simple, identify the issue which could be solved by automatization, task. This is required to pinpoint the starting point of an AI project, overtime it is possible to power up with AI any business process, but at the start of this project it would be beneficial to focus on one or two things.
Goals of AI project.
Next thing that the company needs to do before doing some proper action, is to set criteria of success for AI project. I won’t go for a speech about the importance of goals in order for something to succeed, no. What I really speak about is an having a proper direction for the AI project to go. If the company doesn’t know what AI should achieve, there would be a proper development direction, which would cause a waste of time and money. That the opposite of what AI supposed to help with.
The Budget.
Every big change requires money. Although with the rise of AIaaS there is a trend for price democratization of AI services, still having a decent room in a company’s budged for the project would be a wise idea. With this data I believe there wouldn’t be any problem of figuring out how much money AI project may be cost the company.
Time
Last thing to consider when planning AI adoption is time. Development of any software is time-consuming process, AI project is no difference. Initial pilot project may take up to 3–4 months to develop, make operational, and have first results with it.
After that development team needs time to make change, considering initial result, new goals and direction of the project. There are also may be mistakes on the path, let’s be realistic. That will create some setbacks and time delays.
In the end, in order to extract an actual value from the AI project, company need to spend around one year on average. After that company would have a properly working AI solution that helps to solve require business tasks. So, when planning adoption of AI, keep in mind that it takes time.
Action Time.
With goals in place, preparations set, it is time to take action towards AI adoption. With all I described above, the following actions shouldn’t feel so complex. Though following advice will make it easier for the whole ordeal.
Prepare your Data.
The most important step you could make when starting AI adoption is to prepare your data. Data is the bread and butter of any Artificial Intelligence software. With a poorly organized data set, insight that AI may have to give is no more useful than wisdom of an infant.
That means a proper data organization is a crucial aspect of any AI project. Before company starts a proper implementation, all required data should be neatly organized and tagged. To make the task easier, it would be great to isolate data required for the project and focus on it, instead of cleaning up entirety of a company database.
Hire Professionals
Next step company should make is a pick who will behind the project. There two paths for this.
Traditional choice would require the company to hire a Data Scientist and team of developers who able to develop the AI from ground zero. Having team within a company who able to develop the entire project is quite flexible solution because they would be able to react immediately when problems arrive and solve them immediately. They will would be able to fine tune every aspect of AI solution they develop as company require.
But there are caveats to it. Making project from scratch requires even more time and effort than just tweaking existing solution. Another issue is a budget. Above I provide link to article that goes over average prices to develop AI solution for companies. Having your own team wouldn’t be near as cheap. Here average salary of Data Scientist for comparison. So if you don’t have bottomless budget it would be wise to revert to a second approach.
Use services of company that provide AIaaS (Artificial Intelligence as a Service) solutions. This approach would be far cheaper than having your own in-house team. Those companies already have solutions ready for deployment which may drastically decrease time before the company will make some value from investment in the AI. Considering that AIaaS is on the rise it could be the right approach for adoption AI in the company.
Take it slowly.
Last step that a company should make is small. Then another and another. As I established above, AI implementation is a complex and time-consuming process, there is no need to rush.
Give your own team or contracted company for initial deployment of a small feature set and watch first results. Make adjustments to the solution and watch it again. After initial implementation meets its goals and would be considered successful, spread out AI involvement in more business processes. Step by step automating anything that makes sense. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Conclusion
Ignoring AI as a valuable business tool in the current world is a dangerous decision. Many companies already successfully adopted this technology for their own benefit. Yes, it may be a complex project to take on and it takes time to harvest some fruits from it. But with a slow methodical approach, AI adoption will bring great value to any enterprise.
