Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Digital Transformation. What do they mean to you? It’s easy for people working day in and day out in a technology environment to throw these phrases around easily and tell people they should be implementing these things in their business. Why would you though unless there was a proven benefit.

Digital transformation is a collective term for using digital technologies to redefine business processes. Cloud migration, AI and machine learning are examples of digital transformation projects within a business.

The touchpoints for AI and machine learning are wide and varied across business functions and departments and has applications such as:

• In finance for revenue forecasting
• In marketing for promotion planning, personalised offers and advert placement
• In sales for making recommendations on products
• In maintenance and facilities management for predicting equipment maintenance schedules

The technology of AI can be applied throughout business and is a key driver in future proofing business to remain competitive and ahead of the competition.

Let’s expand on some of the applications of AI and machine learning in business:

Personalised customer communication:

AI can identify trends in browsing habits and in purchasing activity to offer tailored offers and personised communication based on that. This in turn drives customer loyalty and interaction with your communications which ultimately leads to increased sales.

Automated customer communication:

Without applying AI, how do you communicate with your customers? Emails, online chat, social media conversations or phone calls perhaps? The common theme in all of those is that there will likely be a human at the end of the conversation. AI enables the automation of these conversations, for example using chatbots to automate online conversations based on key word triggers used in the question from the customer. This opens up wider conversations to happen at any one time and not limited by the number of people answering questions. It also opens up 24 hour, real-time communications. If there is a need for human intervention then your are limited by working hours. With AI, you can automate responses and refer to a human to intervene when needed or to pick up during working hours but in many cases, queries can be resolved based on the automations and triggers set-up in the system.

Data mining:

Data can be read by means of AI technology in a way that is simply not possible for humans and can pull out key points and offer insight into the data to make decisions. We have seen this in action with a client who uitilises machine learning to read documents from council meeting minutes to extract the relevant information related to traffic management schemes. This detail would be across a number of documents ranging in size from 10-70 pages long and was a completely manual piece of work, reading through the text of the meeting minutes and finding the relevant information. By implementing a machine learning algorithm that can scrape the web, find the council meeting minutes, scan the text from those minutes, extract the relevant data relating to traffic schemes and understand the data they have reduced manual effort in this task by 75%.

Predictions to make decisions:

The data analysis capabilities of AI technology scan data to recognise patterns which can help to guide which products are likely to sell well where others may not.

Streamline recruitment processes:

AI can be used to sift through large volumes of data to narrow down a shortlist of candidates in the recruitment process. This would involve telling the system what criteria are key and should be included and what should be ruled out.

Summary

These are just a few of the areas for business where AI and machine learning can make an impact. Recent articles have talked about AI in terms of producing content for marketing and this morning I read a report which talked of how an AI application can help detect osteoarthritis up to 3 years in advance of the onset

AI and machine learning isn’t the future prediction of films – it is here, it is now and having a real positive impact on the way businesses operate. In future blogs I will explore use cases in more detail and how you can harness this technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Want to know more now? Let’s talk. Let us know when suits you and one of our team will be on hand to offer a free consultation on what could work for you.  It’s not the future – it’s now so why wait? – let’s see what you could do.