Artificial Intelligence Strategies Startups Should Use to Grow AI can improve your customer experience, protect your company from data breaches, and optimize your HR processes.
By Dmitry Dragilev •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Consumers have incredibly high expectations for companies to deliver faster and more personalized experiences, which is fueling the demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. In turn, the increase in this utilization of AI is driving growth for many startups.
Here are some AI tactics you can use today to scale and grow your business.
Customer experience automation
Around 90 percent of consumers consider an immediate response important, and they demand a connected experience whenever they interact with a brand. Therefore, more organizations are investing in smarter solutions for better customer support. One of the simplest ways to do this is to embrace AI-powered applications, such as chatbots, voice search, and virtual assistants to improve customer experience. These software applications help you to provide quick responses, offer high efficiency, generate leads, and offer personalization.
A recent study of different customer service software found that many providers have several AI-assisted features to remove manual tasks for customer service reps and boost productivity. In fact, 54 percent of customers have daily AI-enabled interactions with businesses that include interaction with chatbots, digital assistants, facial recognition, and biometric scanners.
When we use a combination of AI and ML, or machine-learning, for gathering and analyzing social, historical, and behavioral data, we can accurately understand customers. Providing personalized real-time assistance to customers with the use of chatbots can place them in high-traffic areas to answer basic questions, offer advice, or help place orders. We can also send highly-customized emails by analyzing topics of interest and detecting patterns to recommend relevant content.
Related: 3 Key Trends Leading the CRM Revolution
Make data-driven decisions
A survey by Gartner shows that more than 65% of the decisions made today are more complex as compared to two years ago. Therefore, data-driven decisions help businesses to make better marketing decisions and measure KPIs and metrics based on facts and figures. Around 66 percent of decision-makers say that AI-based applications help them to increase profits and reach their goals.
We can use AI to analyze large datasets and help to make instant decisions. We can also implement AI applications such as NLP, or Natural Language Processing, to understand how customers are interacting with a brand. Using AI tools such as chatbots, machine learning, and algorithms can help us to get a deeper understanding of a customers' pain points, expectations, and satisfaction levels. Thus, AI-based intelligent assistants empower decision-makers with both prescriptive and predictive insights to support faster and better data-driven decision-making.
Improve data security
There has been an increase in the number of cybersecurity cases. According to a study by Aura, 47% of Americans experienced a data breach last year. Many breaches were experienced by employees at businesses and organizations. A survey by McKinsey shows that only 16 percent of organizations are well-prepared to deal with a data breach. This is where AI-based technologies are critical, as they help information security teams reduce breach risk and improve their security posture efficiently. These applications can analyze several events faster than humans, such as employee identity theft, account compromise, SSL fraud, or SIP trunk fraud. They also provide automatic protection such as VPNs and malware software which automatically scans, detects, and exterminates viruses, and spyware that identifies risky behavior that might lead to a trojan attack.
Related: 10 Data Security Measures You Can't Do Without
Optimize HR processes
The traditional HR process usually takes hours and days to get completed. Around 52% of human resources leaders consider identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool to be very challenging. However, with the advent of AI, companies can speed up their hiring process by automating the hiring tasks, such as sorting through resumes, calling applicants, and scheduling interviews to find the perfect candidate. As per a survey by LinkedIn, nearly 67% of hiring managers said that AI saves them time in the hiring process. With the help of AI-based software, one simply needs to input the right set of parameters to find an ideal candidate, then further use AI to sort and filter the list or conduct automated assessments. AI can also improve candidate experience, as AI-based software enables one to update the candidates about where they are in the review and hiring process.
Automate marketing efforts
AI also allows businesses to transform their marketing efforts by optimizing and automating marketing tasks. These tasks can include content generation, digital campaigns, programmatic advertising, and email marketing. More than 44% of marketers now use marketing automation platforms. In fact, another 42 percent are planning to use it in the next few years. For scaling-up, AI tools such as Curata and MarketMuse help to discover fresh content ideas and write and optimize content for different audiences. Further, one's content can then be compared with top-ranking content, with recommendations and advice provided to achieve similar results.
Management of digital ad campaigns can be enhanced by using programmatic advertising to reach a broader audience base, with AI tools such as Albert AI to manage digital ad campaigns. These AI tools take care of all the digital marketing activities, such as ad buying, prospect segmenting, cross-channel execution, testing, optimization, and analysis.
AI also allows you to optimize your email marketing campaign. It helps you to understand and predict customer actions based on their behavior. Thus, you can personalize your emails and get the best subscriber response. Personalized emails through AI have an open rate of more than 18 percent, so leveraging AI in marketing is a good idea, as it enables you to select the right message, increase campaign ROI, and build better customer relationships.
Related: How Algorithms Can Predict Our Intentions Faster Than We Can
Final thoughts
The future belongs to cognitive technologies and to businesses that can adopt their use. As a startup, you must consider implementing AI technologies, including machine learning, computer vision, NLP, or voice assistants. Startups leveraging AI in their businesses will see a competitive advantage, leading to greater efficiency and higher profits.
