How Can Startups Harness the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence?

What associations pop in your mind when you hear the word AI? You probably imagine robots doing some menial job. Maybe you think of a self-driving car or helpers like Alexa or Siri. Yes, AI is all of that, but it has the real potential of disrupting the business landscape.

For many of us, AI is still a futuristic concept for you, something that is going to happen in the future. But the truth is that AI is already a part of modern business. At least, it should be if a company wants to stay ahead of its competitors in 2020.

Businesses of all kinds, including startups and enterprises are heavily investing in AI technologies. More than that, AI is posed to become the savior for startups. A growing set of startups rely on AI tools to outstrip competitors and ramp up the business.

If you are in the startup environment, then you should know how AI can be your helper for boosting your business. In this post, we go over how you can leverage AI to benefit your business.

1. AI improves customer experience 

According to American Express, over 40% of clients expect to get a fast customer service. That's quite obvious. All businesses today are centered around customers, and your business depends on they way you treat your customers. More so, companies with quick and effective customer support in place usually have an upper hand over competition.

AI can help you with establishing convenient customer support. Accenture reported that in the upcoming year about 80 percent of customer support will be performed with the help of chatbots.

Many startups are using AI apps to that can handle common queries quickly. In addition to a fast response, chatbots can also to answer these questions and address the problems:

•  What are the common complaints?

•  What is the customer's age, location?

•  What they prefer?

•  Provide tailored offers and discounts

•  Solve problems in real-time, guide to relevant FAQ or articles in blog

The better more information you feed to the chatbot, the better the chatbot will be trained. It works like this – when a customer engages with a chatbot, it identifies a query through a series of responses and then provides an answer.

With a powerful customer-facing chatbot, you can meet the needs of a customer, which matters a lot to business growth, be it an it offshoring service company or a retail provider.

Important: Deploy chatbots at specific points in the sales funnel. This will help sell more and improve conversion rates.

For example, Google Play leverages AI to help customers find what they are looking for and share music. AI suggests music based on your past searched, time of the day and genres you've listened to before. Another one – Pizza Hut augments the customer journey by with chatbots that help customers to order, reorder, ask for deals and any other questions.

2. AI is the foothold for data-driven decisions

Applying AI in business analytics can be crucial for the success of your startup. AI and machine learning is the route to cutting-edge tools that allow to get insights into customer behavior and market trends to make decisions based on this data.

In this day and age, startups don't need to solely rely on reports generated by BI software when they can get insights with a great practical value to help them make data-driven decisions.

3. AI is behind strategic decision making 

AI allows to make rational decisions instead of relying on inconsistent and incomplete data. Before AI, it was impossible to process large amounts of data that could be used for decision-making. With AI, you can have immediate knowledge of constantly changing customer demands to tailor your products or services accordingly.

Coca-Cola is a great example of a company that leverages AI for business analysis. With 500 brands and a huge customer base in 200 countries, the company operates a massive amount of data. The company uses AI and big data tech to put this data to use to come up with new products. Cherry Sprite was launched based on data which came from the beverage machines where customers can mix drinks of their choice.

The best thing about AI is that it makes data understandable for everyone, meaning you don't have to be a specialists to interpret the data provided by the AI tool.

4. AI ensures marketing automation

AI automates your marketing efforts. AI-powered tools help boost content creation, set up digital campaigns and manage email marketing.

Using AI tools, you can discover ideas and tailor content to different audience. Tools like Semrush use AI to help SEO specialists to save time on writing SEO-optimized content.

AI is the best ally for startups aiming to tap into a broader audience. Digital ad campaigns powered by AI means that you only need to create the ads, the rest will be done by the machine. The tools can take over marketing activities like media buying, audience segmentation, cross-channel marketing, testing, and analysis.

AI will help you with your email strategy, too. By making forecasts about customer behavior, you can set up personalized campaigns and achieve better response. AI is a valuable tool if you want to improve your personalized email efforts and send tailored offers to the customers. This way you can enjoy an increased open rate and higher conversion rate.

5. AI helps you hire at the top of the market

AI can help you streamline your hiring efforts, especially with everyday routine tasks. It's really a time-consuming task to narrow down your candidate pool to only a few right ones for the role. Manually screening resumes takes a lot of time and may be ineffective. There's always a risk to pass up the best applicants. AI can help recruiters by screening automatically and filtering out irrelevant candidates.

HR managers can use data based on the candidate's performance with skills pertaining to the role. The AI tools can digest the company's performance data along with the characteristics of the best employees. Based on this, the AI tools creates a survey for the applicants.

6. AI enhances data security 

Cybersecurity has become an important question in recent years. It takes months to recover from a security attack. Although the security attack can cause losses worth of millions dollars, many organizations still rely on outmoded threat detection methods.

AI can come in handy with a more reliable and modern solutions like spotting suspicious behavior on your website or users with malicious intentions.

Summary 

AI can help your startups organization reach its potential. With advanced AI tools you can reap such benefits:

•  Implement front-line chatbots for quick customer service

•  Leverage AI tools to make data-driven decisions

•  Implement AI   to set up your digital marketing campaigns

•  Apply AI in the recruitment process

•  Strengthen security with modern AI solutions

After all, every organization wants to grow the top line, and AI can be instrumental in this journey.