It's another day, and you're ready to take on work like a champion. This positive attitude guides you all the way to your desk. And then, it hits you. You see how much you really have on your plate. Sometimes you think, “people don’t know how much I have to handle these days”. You have to improve the bottom line, reduce workflow inefficiencies and improve reporting. On top of that, you have data in a few spots, but don’t know how to effectively glean the information you need from it. Enter artificial intelligence (AI).
Using AI with your data offers you many benefits. One of those benefits is that AI can save you valuable time and money. On top of that, you can reduce potential errors by leaning on AI. One of the most valuable benefits, and one that almost any successful business could use more of, is gaining valuable insights from your data.
Using AI to help save on budget
To help illustrate how AI can help save on your budget, one would only need to look back a few years at the factory and warehouse industry. Over time, factories and warehouses have shifted jobs and duties away from people and given those tasks to machines. AI is not much different.
Say you pay someone to sift through and compile your data. This can be a time and budget black hole. This is where AI can shine -- you can replace duties or staff positions with machine learning and processing. At the end of the day, inefficient Johnny can be replaced with AI, saving time and money. On a larger scale, this could mean saving millions or billions. In fact, a study was done on how much the government could save with AI, and it was in the billions.
For example, the City of Memphis was tasked with improving residents' lives and visitors' experiences by creating safer streets and communities. The city used Google Cloud AI to detect potholes with 90%+ accuracy. This led to a projected 75% increase in potholes identified. Altogether this reduced the city claims costs for damage due to unaddressed potholes, saving the city up to $20,000 a year.
AI can help reduce errors
Disclaimer: Even AI can make mistakes. That being said, AI is much more reliable than human-curated data. Through many studies, AI boasts a 99% efficiency rating. Even sophisticated businesses are learning that AI is more reliable than “the human way of curating data”.
Why is human intervention bad? Or, better question, why is AI so much more effective than a human? AI has a distinct advantage over people -- it makes decisions based on the available data only. It doesn’t have opinions, it doesn’t have emotions. Just data.
If you’re pushing your company to new heights on sheer horsepower and will, this point is often overlooked. But it’s a complete gamechanger. You business could be one bad copy + paste away from making a money-draining decision.
Gathering insights from your data by using AI
Important questions get answered by AI, and only get better over time. These can include questions like:
What product will sell out first?
Will we need to downsize next winter?
When should we open another location?
What client or customer deserves the most attention, but isn’t getting it?
By setting up data points and configuring AI to work with your data-stack, you can start asking your AI important questions. When you do this, watch your AI laser focus, learn, and get better answers over time.
AI in conversation
Did you know that AI can talk, interact and understand? AI can be used in the conversation your business has with its customers. If you have a thirst for improving how your business performs, using AI to guide customer communication could quench that thirst.
Simple applications of this are text-to-speech and speech-to-text. We actually built functionality with text-to-speech at one point. We have a client who had their staff talking to numerous people at once. That person, an auctioneer, also had an earpiece in. They also had to know what was happening with the online auction, hence the earpiece. We developed software that connected to the earpiece of the auctioneer. When there was an online bid, the auctioneer would be alerted within microseconds, and then notify everyone of the high bid.
AI is also used heavily in chatbots.
AI in documents
Have you ever searched for something in Google Drive, Dropbox, or another cloud service, and a PDF or image or document shows as a result? This could be a pleasant surprise. You may be wondering how it is possible to have documents be associated with data. The answer, AI.
AI can derive insights from unstructured text using machine learning. It can extract text from documents with world-class accuracy. This includes supporting over 200 languages and 50 languages for handwriting recognition. It can extract text and values from invoices, such as dates, addresses, phone numbers, companies, prices, and numerical values.
If your organization has a need to sift through all kinds of documents, no need to worry, AI has your back.
AI in Data
We’ve worked with a major league sports team. They always said that speed kills, and you can take that both ways. When you get news out the fastest, you get the most eyeballs. On the flipside, if you’re slow to get news out, it hurts your brand. They used real-time audio translation to create content almost instantly online.
You may be thinking, “I don’t need to translate audio into real-time content”. That’s fine. But AI doesn’t stop there. AI can do even more with your data. This could include delivering highly personalized product recommendations at scale. Or this could include forecasting product availability with high accuracy. Or it could mean that you could find, assess, and link the medical knowledge in your text data.
So seriously, what can AI do for my business?
There are too many possibilities to mention here. My goal was to hopefully make a lightbulb go off and spark some ideas on your end. If that didn’t happen, no worries, we can gladly pick our brain and dream up some ideas together.
Are you curious what AI can do for you?
