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As AI both advances and becomes more accessible, an increasing number of businesses are finding ways to leverage the technology in their day-to-day operations. Especially with more companies embracing the hybrid or fully remote workplace, AI is claiming the large corner office with a view. 

 

While AI’s prominent role in many organizations comes with certain risks, it also provides exciting opportunities for businesses to save money, speed up time-consuming tasks, and improve accuracy and efficiency for repetitive tasks. 

 

Let’s look at 6 ways artificial intelligence could support your business’s day-to-day operations. 

 

1. 24/7 customer service support 

Most people first became familiar with AI through the now ubiquitous customer service chatbots. When shopping online, customers have come to expect instant gratification, so it’s become almost a requirement to have around-the-clock customer service support. 

 

Chatbots are a great way to provide this service for a fraction of what it would cost to employ a 24/7 customer support team. Chatbots use machine learning and natural language processing to be able to understand and respond to a long list of customer inquiries. If a customer has a question or request that is beyond the chatbot's ability to comprehend, AI can send the request to the appropriate department for follow-up from a human customer service employee. 

 

2. Marketing and generating content ideas

While AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard should not replace human writers or marketing strategists, they can play an important support role. Marketers can use AI to generate content ideas for blog posts, email subject lines, and social media campaigns. 

 

An AI tool like ChatGPT can’t fully understand all the nuances of your brand, but it can quickly generate a long list of content ideas based on a marketer’s informed query. It’s the marketer’s job to ask the right questions and then to filter through the ideas, cherry picking and customizing those that best fit their company’s brand. 

 

AI can also be used effectively in data analysis, revealing important customer insights. AI tools can listen to the conversations happening across social media platforms and compile useful data on customer likes and dislikes and industry trends. 

 

Competitor analysis, SEO, audience segmentation, and automation are other marketing tasks that can benefit from the use of AI. Dive deeper into the uses of AI in marketing here. 

 

3. Inventory management 

As we saw during the pandemic, forecasting supply chain needs is an incredibly complicated task. AI is capable of collecting and analyzing huge amounts of historical inventory data, potentially eliminating problems like over and under-stocking. It can take into account multiple variables, such as weather forecasts, traffic conditions, and fuel prices to generate more accurate supply-chain needs. See more use cases for AI in inventory management and supply-chain optimization here.  

 

4. Accounting

AI is especially good at tackling repetitive tasks like recording and categorizing data. When it comes to accounting, AI can scan through hundreds of transactions and quickly organize the data based on pre-designated filters. It can do this faster and more accurately than its human counterpart. AI-supported payroll systems are also destined to become a fixture in most businesses.    

 

5. Human resources

Human resources is an industry where the role of AI should be handled with care. Conflict resolution, navigating the health and wellness needs of employees, career growth guidance, and selecting interview candidates should still fall to a team of human HR employees. AI, however, can support an HR team with repetitive, tedious tasks. These may include recruitment, filtering through resumes by searching for specific keywords and phrases, and maintaining employee records.  

 

In more concerning use cases, AI can monitor employee behavior and both real-life and online activity, tracking the time an employee is active online, viewing the websites they visit, and, in the case of Uber, how safely they’re driving. 

 

For many workers, this use of AI has triggered a combination of unease and outright opposition, as employers use the data collected from these AI tools to determine the number of hours worked and associated pay. The data collected from AI monitoring is also used to track compliance and determine whether an employee should be retained, fired, or promoted. 

 

6. IT services

AI is becoming an indispensable tool in the world of IT and cybersecurity. AI systems are good at recognizing patterns and anomalies in learned patterns, allowing them to quickly recognize a cyberattack through constant monitoring and surveillance. When it detects an anomaly in data input, the AI system can search through huge amounts of data and code to determine the source of the attack. This allows an IT team to then eliminate the detected vulnerability in the system, mitigating the potential of a future attack. 

 

Incorporating AI tools into your business

There are many roles that AI can play in your business, but it’s important to keep in mind that artificial intelligence tools should not entirely replace human employees. Repetitive tasks like data entry and analysis are perfect for AI but those tasks that require more creative and critical thinking should still be left to people. 

 

AI is still an emerging technology that is constantly evolving. It cannot be trusted completely to always provide accurate (or unbiased) information and cannot replace human ingenuity. It’s important to remember that machine learning is based on content created by humans. We still need people to continue innovating and producing ideas so that AI has new content to learn from. 

 

AI also still needs to be fact-checked and monitored by humans to prevent egregious mistakes and the spread of misinformation. In the world of IT, for example, people still need to regularly monitor the AI tools used for 24/7 surveillance of your business’s network and systems. There’s also no AI replacement for an IT professional’s expert advice and guidance in creating a customized multi-layered cybersecurity strategy that meets the unique needs of your business.   

 

With those warnings in mind, how might your business use AI to support and improve your operations? As more and more businesses leverage AI tools, it’s important to begin incorporating AI into your own business so that you remain competitive in your industry. 

Feature photo by Good Faces on Unsplash

 

Related posts:

6 Ways to use Microsoft Power Automate to Improve Workflows

Cybersecurity Risks of Your Smart Home Devices

How to Leverage Technology to Recruit Top-Quality Job Candidates

 

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About Pagoda Technologies IT services

Based in Santa Cruz, California, Pagoda Technologies provides trusted IT support to businesses and IT departments throughout Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and across the globe. To learn how Pagoda Technologies can help your business, email us at support@pagoda-tech.com to schedule a complimentary IT consultation.