Artificial Intelligence

5 Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Business

A quick look at how AI is applied in the real world today

Benedict Neo

Published in

bitgrit Data Science Publication

6 min readAug 23, 2021

In this era where vast amounts of data are generated every second, data is a valuable resource for businesses worldwide, which is why some call data the new oil.

To capitalize on data and derive value from it, Artificial Intelligence is needed, which is why it’s booming in the business world, weaving its way into how decisions are made and how operations are handle.

According to research firm Gartner, companies implementing AI-related technologies from 2015 to 2019 grew by 270 percent. It will continue to grow as AI continues to improve and becomes more and more democratized.

In this article, we’ll be exploring five specific use cases of Artificial Intelligence in the business world, from aiding in decision-making, driving growth, reducing cost, and many more.

1. Business Intelligence

Traditional business intelligence (BI) tools require users to spend large amounts of time cleaning and prepping vast amounts of data.

With data rising at an astounding rate, as seen in a study by IDC, Data Age 2025, which predicts worldwide data creation growing to an enormous 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025, it’s going to be challenging to derive insight from big data.

The solution? AI-powered BI tools.

By combining AI with BI, you get the benefits such as automated data cleansing and prepping. These tools can also analyze data faster and more accurately than humans and provides insights and predictions on the fly.

Companies can perform various business operations more effectively, leverage AI in business management, ultimately develop better business strategies, and make data-driven decisions.

One example of an AI-powered BI tool is IBM Cognos Analytics.

2. Targeted marketing

For any company to grow and thrive, it’s essential to understand the consumer's needs, even better than the consumers themselves.

With data collected on the customer’s activities, companies can utilize AI to classify and predict which particular product should be marketed to which customer.

For example, the e-commerce giant Amazon has its own intelligent system that learns everything there is to know about a user — browsing and buying behavior, geolocation, app use data, etc., then generates what products to recommend.

Let’s say you’re looking for a monitor on Amazon, and you clicked on one that you like. Next time you’re on the platform, it’s going to start recommending you a ton of monitors of different brands and prices and maybe even related products such as keyboards, computer mice, power extensions, etc.

The same goes for streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify which will monitor and understand users’ behavior and provide recommendations unique to each user.

With data from the online activities of users, companies can utilize AI to increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, and ultimately increase sales and revenue of the company.

3. Customer service and experience with NLP

Another prevalent use of AI in business is understanding customers and providing an excellent service with Natural Language Processing (NLP), which gives computers the ability to understand human language.

In most websites you visit today, you’ll see a chatbot icon or pop-up at the bottom-right corner. They are bots or digital assistants powered by NLP and can understand human language and answer simple to moderate level questions, and direct customers to the necessary information.

Compared to humans, chatbots are available 24/7 and can handle multiple tasks at once, which translates to higher customer satisfaction. Moreover, they can learn and self-improve as they receive more data. They also help reduce traffic to customer service representatives, allowing them to deal with more specific issues of the customers.

Another use of NLP in business is to understand customer experience and satisfaction. This is done through scouring the internet for comments, social media posts mentions of the company, and then utilize sentiment analysis to understand the consumer’s impression and experience of the product or brand. With an automated system set in place, companies can constantly receive feedback and improve their product accordingly.

4. Human resource

Hiring and retaining talent is an essential component of a successful company. To lift some weight off the shoulders of the HR team, AI can be utilized.

Firstly, hiring is fundamentally a data-driven decision. You look at a person’s qualifications and determine whether they’re fit for the job from the given information.

Instead of having HR do the tedious work of going through each application and then shortlisting potential candidates, companies can leverage AI algorithms to screen and hire the best-fit candidates, automating the repetitive tasks and standardizing the hiring process.

Hiring the right people for the job is not the end, but just the beginning, since retaining, mentoring, and assessing their performance is all the more important, and AI can aid as well.

With AI tools, HR can assess employees in terms of their performance and effectively plan and manage the employees, for example, where an employee needs more improvement, and then assign more training, or when to reward a high-performing employee.

In general, AI in HR can take on all the repetitive work and automates them, freeing up the team for more human tasks in the company.

5. Sales forecasting

The numbers for the future, forecasts, are essential. Take the weather forecast, for example. You make plans based on whether it will be sunny or rainy. That decision is pretty trivial, but in the business world, every decision counts.

Business leaders and executives look at sales forecasts to make almost any decision since that is what determines long-term business growth. They use it to decide whether the company should budget more, hire a few more engineers, or invest in some new technology.

There are tons of variables, such as competition and the market condition, that can all impact sales in a company. Without an AI forecast, the sales team will be at a disadvantage, as traditional forecasting methods cannot keep up with the complexity and side of data today.

But with the power of AI, the complex and dynamic relationship of sales data can be modeled, and accurate sales forecasts are automatically generated based on historical sales data, along with customer information.

This empowers the sales team with prospects who are most likely to close, who to target next, and even identify new customers. All in all, it helps companies boost their lead volume, close rate, and overall sales performance.

It’s clear AI has a place in the sales team. Based on research by sales professionals, Salesforce tells us that “AI is the top growth area for sales teams — its adoption is forecasted to grow 139%” from 2019 to 2021.

General benefits of AI in your business

AI provides tons of benefits in business. Aside from specific uses cases, it provides myriads of general benefits, which includes:

Making data-driven decisions
Increase productivity of the company
Reduce cost through automation and optimization
Increase efficacy and speed in processing data
Free up employees for more human and creative tasks
Increase revenue and boost sales
Understand customers better

Thinking of applying AI to your business?

bitgrit is an Asia-based networking platform for data scientists that develops mechanisms to optimize AI and better integrate it in today’s society.

Please contact us for consulting. More information on our website.

Thanks for reading!

References

If you want to dive deeper into what more AI can do, check out this article by AI Multiple 100+ AI Use Cases & Applications in 2021: In-Depth Guide.

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