As a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner, understanding artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly benefit your business. Here’s a structured approach to enhancing your AI knowledge:
1. Understand AI
Some people are scared of AI and think computers will take over their jobs but instead, AI is here to accelerate their work and offer amplified customer service. But to get over the fear of AI, you need to understand what it is. AI stands for artificial intelligence. This form of intelligence is evolving technology that is used to simulate human intelligence using machines.
If you would like a broad understanding of AI, you can do an online course with Coursera called “Introduction to AI”.
You can also join AI communities online to get a better understanding of AI. Another avenue you can consider is to attend webinars and workshops.
2. Implement AI
Now that we have a broad understanding of AI, what benefit does it have for my business? AI can improve efficiencies, customer service and decision-making. Using AI, you can automate repetitive operations. You can use it to answer frequently asked questions and to redirect the customer to the right person at the complaints desk. Furthermore, AI can help you to look for commonalities in comments from customers so that you can improve your product offering. Lastly, they can help with research for your business.
To implement AI into your business, you need to look at your processes and find where it will be the best return on investment. When you find the process you would like to change to AI, you need to educate your staff on how to use the new technology and grow with it.
3. Experiment with AI
As AI is still in the beginning stages, you will need to have an open mind. You will also need to encourage your staff to experiment with AI and offer up whatever knowledge they gain from using AI.
4. Review AI
As AI is intelligence which relies on the input of humans, you will need to review the information you receive. This will help you to recognise any anomalies and correct them before you make an investment into the wrong project. You will also need to make sure that what you do with the AI information is ethical.
By following these four approaches, you will have improved your knowledge of AI and how you can use it in your business. It is important that when you consider implementing AI, you do it in small bites. You could use a chatbot to help with customer service. The other element to consider when choosing AI applications is how they scale. You want to choose applications which can scale with your organisation.
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