Many small businesses working with limited resources think that new technology and new tools driven by AI are out of their budgets’ reach, reserved only for the select few conglomerates with big backers with even deeper pockets.
But that’s where they’re wrong: this revolution is all about democratizing the power of AI to every kind of business — big or small.
Why Should Small Businesses Implement AI?
AI is going to become an inseparable part of the fabric of the future of business. How can you leverage AI for small businesses — and more importantly, why should you?
From helping improve their digital marketing efforts like content creation and email marketing to developing systems to develop a better understanding of their potential customers and customer behavior, all the way to performing repetitive tasks — the benefits of AI are real.
Even small businesses can harness the power of AI with the emergence of AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) providers that can help them design and implement AI solutions right away, and here are the main reasons why they should:
- Automate tedious, repetitive tasks and reduce human errors. AI has the ability to analyze massive amounts of data, reducing the man hours spent on mundane and repetitive tasks prone to human errors. This frees up human and financial capital to pursue higher-priority business goals and help you make better decisions with data-driven AI insights.
- Reduce operational costs over time. Automating a certain segment of your small business can very well pay for itself many times over by increasing synergies and enhancing operational efficiency so you can focus your efforts on growing your business.
- Improve service levels and enhance customer experience. AI tools enable you to derive key insights about your target audience and their behavior. This can be an opportunity for you to personalize your marketing, improve customer service, and enhance the overall customer journey with the most impeccable precision.
- Tighten up information/cyber security. Small businesses can and should deploy AI security solutions to help them identify suspicious cyber activity and nip it in the bud before it becomes a real problem.
And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what AI can do for small businesses.
AI is the key to unlocking productivity, efficiency, and innovation for all businesses moving forward.
AI-Powered Social Media Management and Content Creation for SMBs
If you create any sort of content for your online presence — whether they be landing pages, sales letters, email sequences, product descriptions, SEO metadata, or social media posts regardless of platform — one of the primary ways you can harness the power of AI is in your digital content marketing efforts.
- More efficient content creation across all platforms. AI tools are making social media management and content creation a breeze. For instance, our Ghostwriter can help small and big companies alike with their content marketing efforts using its ability to process and create either long or short-form content as though it was written by a human.
- Improve advertising campaign performance. Better still, small businesses can improve the performance of their advertising campaigns using specialized AI tools that can predict ad performance long before you run it live. And since AI tools’ algorithms improve over repeated use, they will eventually help you structure and run your ads for optimal results. AI can even deliver insights on what tone, words, and images work best for your target audience.
- Build better conversion strategies and attract new customers. Lastly, AI tools can help you tweak and improve your campaigns based on your website’s hard numbers. They can give you a complete rundown and answer common questions you might have about your website’s performance and help you create better conversion funnels to attract new customers in the most efficient way possible.
Automating Customer Support with AI
One of the proven and most effective ways that business owners of all sizes can utilize AI is to automate their customer service channels by way of chatbots.
- Chatbots. Chatbots are an effective, affordable way to cut down on employee expenses while providing a 24/7 customer service channel to engage customers and achieve a variety of help desk tasks that you might have otherwise needed to hire for or outsource. Moreover, if a particular customer’s request is too complex for a chatbot to handle, it can automatically set up a meeting with a human representative in no time at all. Better still, the more “reps” chatbots get by interacting with customers, the more effectively they perform.
- Automated ticket triage. For companies to stay ahead of the game, they need to smooth out the ticket-handling process. AI can make that process as efficient as possible by automatically triaging incidents or service tickets. Many AI-driven businesses have already implemented automatic ticket triaging to streamline their workflows based on urgency and risk and are reaping the rewards by reducing the time it takes for first responders to act on major incidents. By freeing up resources, it has allowed their agents to focus on more meaningful tasks and responsibilities, while customers have been delighted with improved response and resolution times as well as a more personalized experience.
Streamlined, Personalized Marketing Campaigns and Lead Generation With AI
Perhaps the greatest advantage of using artificial intelligence — particularly through generative AI tools (artificial intelligence technique that creates new content like images and music using two neural networks) that create AI-generated content — is its ability to create bespoke, hyper-personalized content. This can be in the form of automated email sequences, social media posts, or chatbot scripts based on a solid understanding of customer behavior that can address the exact needs and wants of your clients and deliver a powerful customer experience.
This hyper-personalized messaging is applicable to all sorts of content and copy. From landing pages, order pages, customer forms, surveys, and dynamic websites alike, AI-generated content is firmly in the future of marketing.
Here are other ways you can leverage AI for marketing and sales:
- Prospecting sales leads. AI can help sales professionals focus on what they need to do to sell, convert, and drive company profit. AI can be used to detect certain customer behavioral patterns based on hard data and then apply said patterns using machine learning algorithms to identify potential new customers.
- Lead scoring. AI can also help small businesses rate their potential leads based on data like phone records, voicemails, and scheduled meetings. Knowing which prospects are most likely to convert allows sales representatives to focus on them and further personalize their pitch based on their data.
- Sales forecasting. AI helps improve your sales forecasts by giving you an accurate, data-driven picture of your sales pipelines. With this insight, you can better predict which deals to progress and which ones to shelve in the meantime.
AI for Supply Chain and Inventory Management
Artificial intelligence and machine learning also show tremendous potential in supply chain and inventory management because of the synergies it brings, which enhance the efficiency of supply chain operations. Leveraging AI solutions can help businesses forecast, plan, monitor, and control product supply and demand, helping avoid human errors linked to inventory management — saving companies massive costs over the long haul.
- Predictive algorithms. AI can help companies get an accurate snapshot of their inventory and determine how much of it they need and when they need it. Efficient inventory management helps reduce waste and prevents understocking and overstocking, especially when they need it the most.
- Improved inventory decision-making. AI solutions can harness the power of robotics and sensors to figure out the exact status and location of a company’s inventory with frightening real-time accuracy, allowing businesses to make better decisions about how they manage their inventory.
Improving Financial Management with AI Tools
The benefits of using AI solutions for small and medium-sized businesses alike don’t end there because they can be used to enhance the quality of their financial management. Here’s how:
- Better, more accurate financial forecasts. Utilizing cutting-edge AI technology, a platform can meticulously assess past data related to supply, demand, sales statistics, inventory control, and internal expenditures. The software can then construct models that faithfully forecast future supply and demand and cost of operations based on a thorough analysis of the past. At their very core, these systems can assist finance professionals in generating precise revenue predictions.
- Data-driven risk management. Today’s businesses are confronted with a progressively changing landscape of industry regulations at every turn, not to mention the ever-looming danger of data breaches, security incidents, and hacks. AI can help businesses stay on top of regulatory requirements and compliance standards and mitigate operational, financial, and reputational risk based on hard numbers and data.
- Fraud detection and prevention. Before the advent of AI, fraud detection and prevention had always been within the wheelhouse of forensic accounting professionals and lawyers. AI is bringing that same capability to small and medium-sized businesses, enabling them to analyze their financial transactions and identify fraud based on historic transaction data that deviate from the established norm.
Implementing AI Tools in Human Resources
Last but certainly not least, AI can help bolster human resource management for small to mid-sized enterprises by streamlining hiring processes, allowing your in-house HR team to focus on generalist concerns rather than the nitty-gritty of sifting through a box of CVs. Here are some of the benefits of deploying AI in the realm of HR, regardless of company size:
- Improved efficiency. AI can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks so HR professionals can focus on creating strategies. Moreover, AI also improves decision-making with valuable insights via HR and predictive analytics.
- Reduced costs. AI-powered software can analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and trends and suggest cost-effective solutions. For instance, AI gives information about your sources of hire that generate the highest quality of applicants so you can allocate your hiring budget accordingly or drop ineffective recruitment channels.
- Making better hiring decisions. AI can enhance hiring efficiency by streamlining the screening and selection process. Algorithms can analyze resumes, determine the most qualified candidates, and provide information to help recruiters make better hiring decisions. AI isn’t limited to candidate screening; it can be used during the interview process, too, automating communication to applicants, collecting information from references and analyzing performance tasks.
Key Considerations for Selecting AI Tools for SMBs
Ready to get the most out of AI? Here are a few things to keep in mind before you invest in AI-enabled tools for your business:
- Intuitiveness and ease of use. AI tools require a bit of a learning curve to master. SME owners or decision makers need to choose a solution that is easy to deploy and use without the time investment of hours upon hours of onboarding. What good is a robust, full-featured AI tool with all the bells and whistles if it takes months to see any sort of ROI from it? User-friendliness is the first thing you should look for in an AI product.
- Scalability. SMBs often grow faster than they can adapt. Therefore, business owners need to implement an AI solution that is flexible enough to scale with their business rather than impede its growth.
- Customer service. Every AI solution provider worth its salt has to have a knowledgeable customer service team with a breadth and depth of technical knowledge ready to support your needs from onboarding to performing more complex tasks.
- Robust features. Here’s an important one. You need to make sure that you pick an AI tool that is suitable for your organization’s use and, likewise, one with the requisite natural language processing capabilities and features to meet your company’s needs.
- Consistent, reliable updates. AI is constantly evolving, with algorithms constantly being fine-tuned to keep up with the latest industry updates. Likewise, regardless of company size, you need to find and implement a product that can keep up with the rapid pace of development. For example, at Tailwind, there is an ongoing process, and any new learnings about AI or prompt-writing are implemented as quickly as possible. Our product manager for Ghostwriter also evaluates all prompts on a monthly basis to see if they need to be updated.
Your mileage may vary when choosing the right AI solution for your small business. It’s not easy to find a solution that ticks all your boxes. But these considerations are a great place to begin your search.
The Final Word: SMBs Need to Embrace AI to Stay Competitive
AI is a real game-changer. SMBs can no longer ignore the inevitable digital transformation that AI is spearheading if they wish to thrive and stay relevant in 2023 and beyond.
After all, there’s no better way for SMBs to bring their business ideas to life, scale them, and optimize their productivity and profitability than leveraging AI — and their algorithms only get better over time.
Small to medium-sized businesses have absolutely everything to gain and nothing to lose by implementing AI as part and parcel of their growth strategy moving forward. Those that don’t will eventually be left in the dust by those that do. Just consider the unparalleled advantage that AI can unlock for your business. The possibilities are endless.
Ready to start taking your business to the next level? Try Ghostwriter.
