Smart IT and AI Strategies for a Thriving Business
Artificial intelligence has been in development for decades. However, since the launch of ChatGPT, we’ve seen a significant increase in popularity and hype around it. It’s predicted that this market will grow by almost 30% in the upcoming 5 years.
These predictions show just how valuable and important AI is considered. AI is a tool that can be used in numerous industries and for numerous roles. Early adopters can see benefits from it in the long run.
This article explores the basics of smart IT and AI, as well as some of the most helpful strategies that will help your business reach new heights.
Smart IT and AI explained
IT refers to the strategic use of information technology, including cloud computing and Internet-of-things to improve business processes. AI, on the other hand, enables machines to perform human-like tasks such as learning, automation, reasoning, and problem-solving.
The combination of these two technologies can help your business improve a significant number of processes and solve some crucial problems.
There’s a hype around AI, and while it’s not almighty, it’s certainly a technology that’s going to stick around. It currently helps numerous businesses operate better, and individuals perform better in their roles.
What industries benefited from AI?
AI has transformed numerous industries, while we can say that all companies can benefit from AI, let’s be specific:
- Finance: AI helps with fraud detection, automated trading, and risk assessment models
- Transportation: Numerous processes can be automatized and optimized.
- Software development: Everything that took dozens of minutes to Google before can be understood and solved with the help of AI tools.
- Manufacturing: Predictive maintenance, quality control, and supply chain optimization
Of course, these are only a few notable examples. On the other hand, all of these businesses can benefit indirectly from AI. For example, a finance platform can indeed use AI to detect fraud, but it can also leverage AI chatbots for better customer experience, boosting loyalty and trust.
Best strategies to make your business thrive
From helping you as your therapist to solving your syntax problems in your Python code, AI can really help with a number of different tasks.
However, AI is also great for industry-specific tasks and can significantly benefit whole companies if properly implemented. Some of the smart strategies below can help your business thrive in certain aspects.
Content creation
People talk about how AI will take our content writing, design, and video creation jobs. While tools like Chat GPT video are great for making good content quickly, it’s far from being as good as the best video content creators and writers.
However, it’s a great way of creating marketing content en masse. It can help businesses generate useful articles for their blog or knowledge base. Furthermore, it’s great for video tutorials, as they can be made quickly and provide helpful information.
AI can be used for creating an article or a video 100% or it can be used to make this process quicker. For example, writers can use it to generate outlines, or provide them with certain information, making their job easier. You can also generate an article and then hire a writer to optimize it and make it more human.
What’s also great is that AI tools are useful for repurposing content. You can use old blog articles to make infographics or videos based on them.
Optimization in Transportation
The transportation industry, as we’ve mentioned earlier, has significantly benefited from AI. There are great smart solutions that help companies optimize their routes and fuel consumption. Not only does this alleviate a significant amount of stress from the drivers, but it also minimizes costs.
In a supply chain, AI is used to manage warehouses as it can predict demand, minimize waste, and optimize stock levels. In transportation itself, AI-driven tools can analyze traffic patterns, weather conditions, and vehicle performance.
Not only does the use of AI in transportation provide the business with observable benefits, but lowered fuel consumption is in alignment with eco-friendly practices.
Process automation
All businesses have tedious, time-consuming tasks that have to be done, yet they’re not hard or complex. AI can significantly help automatize them and allow your employees to focus on other, more important tasks.
For example, an HR has to screen hundreds of portfolios when hiring. Many of them won’t fit the most basic requirements. AI can help by analyzing them and automatically rejecting applicants who don’t fit the necessary requirements.
Then, an HR can focus on the rest of the applicants by manually approving the rest of the CVs and interviewing them.
AI can also handle repetitive tasks like data entry and invoicing. This helps minimize the chances of human error and improves efficiency.
Data-driven decisions
Nowadays, data is becoming more valuable than ever. Analyzing data can provide businesses with a lot of helpful insights they can use to make better decisions. AI can analyze vast amounts of data quicker than humans.
AI can analyze trends in customer behavior, allowing you to make better UI/UX, marketing, and product design changes. In this field, AI is better than humans because it doesn’t have emotional or cognitive biases.
Better and more efficient decision-making becomes more important as your business scales. The jump from a hundred to a couple thousand customers can make marketing and business decisions a lot harder to make.
Leveraging AI for cybersecurity
All businesses that have some online operations are at risk of cyber threats. This is especially important since the adoption of data regulations such as GDPR. Suffering a data breach due to poor cybersecurity measures can lead to:
- Lowered reputation,
- Fines,
- Downtime,
- Loss of customer trust.
Cybersecurity is another field that’s benefited from the rise of AI. Many anti-virus software has improved since they have better detection of suspicious behavior. If your sales occur online, it’s essential to recognize and prevent suspicious behavior and transactions.
As a part of cybersecurity protocols, it’s essential that you implement proper IT inventory management techniques. Understanding the different assets that are connected to your network can help you protect them.
AI software is able to analyze vast amounts of transaction data and adequately flag suspicious transactions. Furthermore, many fraud prevention tools have large data bases of problematic individuals, such as politically exposed personas and criminals, allowing you to prevent potential exploitation of your platform.
Cybersecurity solutions powered by AI are great at identifying anomalies and providing overall real-time protection for your business.
AI customer support
Not all businesses require customer support, yet it can be beneficial for many. Customer support helps individuals solve their problems regarding the platform or tool they’re using. The complexity of their inquiries varies from something that could be solved in a minute to something that requires extensive problem-solving and hours.
AI-powered customer support is what helps with the former. Customers who have problems can send a message to an AI chatbot, and they’ll automatically provide them with relevant answers if it has them in the database.
If the user’s problem isn’t solved, then the real human can take over. This can also be considered a form of automation, as your customer support personnel won’t have to bother with tiny problems that could be solved immediately with the proper info.
This allows them to either have downtime or to focus on inquiries that require more work to be solved.
Challenges that AI brings
No new technology comes without some challenges or problems. AI’s pros outweigh its cons by many experts, but it’s important that we objectively mention the downsides of it.
While AI allows businesses to minimize costs for many processes, it can come with high implementation costs. These costs can come in the form of education and training for employees, tools, or infrastructure.
Furthermore, leveraging data that you’ve personally collected to be analyzed via AI can lead to some compliance and privacy concerns. Reaping the benefits of AI insights might require advanced compliance policies and transparent practices.
Smart IT and AI can lead to significant benefits for businesses
Like always, there isn’t a magic wand that can make your failing business suddenly successful. While many people think of AI as the solution for all problems, leg work is still essential for all businesses.
AI is certainly a helpful technology, but businesses will still need to do everything that’s in their power to get a competitive edge. Only then can AI help them streamline certain processes and improve their strategies.
In the long run, AI is there to stay, and it’s essential to be aware of all the different benefits and challenges that come with it.
