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What Every Entrepreneur Must Know About Artificial Intelligence Boost efficiency and productivity. Reduce errors. Plus more cool stuff.

By Rahul Varshneya

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Photographer is my life | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence continues to be increasingly used throughout the general public and businesses to enhance consumer experiences. Research from Gartner predicts AI will generate a business value of $2.9 trillion by 2022. It's making doing business easier because it offers entrepreneurs several benefits that can help them grow their businesses. Here's how:

1. Artificial intelligence helps increase efficiency.

Being able to run your business efficiently is essential to maximizing your resources. It also helps you save time and money for your business in the long run. AI helps entrepreneurs increase operational efficiency. For example, you can create speech recognition software applications that help doctors of your medical practice take notes aloud. This removes the need to handle the transcription of notes that medical billers and coders need to effectively process invoices.

You can even use AI-powered voice assistants to help increase efficiency in the office and assist you with scheduling meetings, setting up reminders and recording points you need to discuss in a team meeting or client presentation.

Related: How AI and Data Science are Poised to Drive Significant Changes for Enterprises in 2019

2. Artificial intelligence enhances productivity.

If you're looking for a way to increase your businesses performance and output, then AI offers some promising results. With AI, you can enhance productivity. For example, you can build software to speed up the process of tracking inventory for your warehouse or manufacturing facility. AI can also be helpful in improving the productivity of procuring leads for your business.

For instance, Harley Davidson employed an AI-powered marketing platform to increase its daily lead generation. This led the company to realize a 2,930 percent increase in leads over three months since its implementation. With increased productivity and speed, you can leverage the power AI to scale your business, too.

3. Businesses can increase automation with artificial intelligence.

Automating manual tasks can help your business save time and money so you can continuously grow. With AI-powered software applications, businesses can expect to increase automation. For instance, you can create software applications to automate business processes and save time in manual labor.

Walmart used robot process automation (RPA) technology and automated a variety of business processes with the help of an estimated 500 bots, including retrieving relevant data from audit documents and answering questions from employees. This helps remove repetitive tasks from workers' responsibilities as well as enables the business to scale its automation intelligently for efficient operations.

Related: The Shape of Things to Come

4. You can enhance customer experience.

Improving your customers' experiences means being available to assist them when they need you the most. However, humans cannot single-handedly be available around the clock. It also can become increasingly expensive to run an operation that supports a workforce of employees with multiple shifts, especially if your business is just starting out.

However, chatbots can help amplify your workforce and enhance the customer experience. For example, you can use chatbots to improve customer service. These AI-powered software algorithms can be present to answer frequently asked questions and take care of tasks when human workers cannot.

Chatbots are part of why travel booking companies, such as Expedia, can improve the customer experience during the booking process. For instance, these companies can leverage machine learning to analyze the customer's browsing patterns and have the chatbots suggest places to book for travel even when human operators are not available.

This helps provide customers with support on-demand by giving answers to customer questions instantly and adds value that helps enhance their experiences with the business. You can also create voice assistants to help improve customers lives by enhancing audio search and making it easier to find the answers they need without having to read or search a menu.

5. Artificial intelligence helps reduce the probability of errors.

Human errors can be costly to any business operation. But with the power of AI, you can reduce the chances of human error. You can create AI-powered software applications that focus on reducing errors and enhancing accuracy when reviewing documents, inputting data and conducting other administrative tasks.

For instance, JP Morgan's legal team has been able to leverage the power of AI to reduce errors while only taking seconds to analyze thousands of documents. When you're able to reduce the time it takes to review large sets of data or complete several tasks, you can save on costs over time.

Related: Five Reasons Why Chatbots are the Future of Customer Service

6. Artificial intelligence facilitates creativity.

It's important to be innovative if you want your business to stay competitive, and creativity is an important step to achieve innovation. AI can help bolster creativity. For example, you can use RPA to remove repetitive tasks from human laborers, such as running and creating reports or analyzing inventory management. This saves time for your employees so they can dedicate more time to creative tasks.

7. You can improve your return on investment.

With the help of AI, you can improve your ROI. When your business operation is functioning efficiently, and your team can focus on important tasks that enhance productivity and contribute directly to your business' revenue, such as strategic planning and design, you can gain a better return on your investment. That's because you enhance productivity and efficiency when you can support accuracy, workflow management and improve customers' experiences that result in retention and increased revenue.

Rahul Varshneya

Co-founder at Arkenea

Rahul Varshneya is the co-founder of Arkenea, an award-winning web and mobile app development agency.

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