It has been a busy month in the world of artificial intelligence (AI).
For one, retail giant Walmart just announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft that allows them to tap into AI technology for their e-commerce site, price adjustments, and to expand its online grocery program. The commitment leads with Walmart migrating all of their internal business applications to the MS Azure cloud. Then, this week Microsoft acquired XOXCO, a software development firm focused on bot design, making it the fourth AI-related company they’ve purchased this year alone.
Of course, it’s not just Microsoft that understands the importance of AI as 72% of business leaders deem it to be a business advantage. While the applications vary by industry, the benefits detailed below draw direct parallels to your own needs in some shape or form.
4 Ways Your Business Can Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Gain a Competitive Advantage in 2019 and Beyond
1. Providing Powerful Cybersecurity Against Advanced Threats
One of the most powerful applications of AI is the most critical for many businesses. Cybersecurity is the greatest IT concern for organizations in 2018-19 and it shows no signs of slowing down. Cybercriminals are coming up with more advanced ways to bypass antiquated antivirus subscriptions and firewalls to install malware.
This is why business solutions such as MS 365 leverage AI to offer enterprise level security and advanced threat protection for its applications, including Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other tools your company depends on to conduct day to day operations. In fact, any endpoint security solution that claims to detect zero-day threats and protect against advanced malware isn’t worth its weight in bytes without leveraging AI to do so.
When seeking out an IT support firm for cybersecurity verify that they employ advanced end-point threat protection through machine learning and artificial intelligence. Otherwise you won’t be prepared for what’s to come.
2. Predicting What Clients/Customers Want
AI helps scale online sales and revenue acquisition programs because it allows a business to predict what customers/clients want to order along with other actions that drive revenue to your business. This knowledge can be applied to make the most relevant recommendations to your customers/clients from within your own site (or other online portal) and ultimately improve their experience by making it more relevant to them and their unique needs. This is marketing at its best.
The data surrounding adoption of AI to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace cannot be ignored. CMO reports that top-performing companies state they are more than twice as likely as their competitors to be using AI for marketing. But the trend is not exclusive to enterprise businesses, as over 60 percent of overall respondents indicated that AI and machine learning will be their most significant data initiative for the year ahead. Keep reading.
3. Managing Data Without Human Error or Subjective Opinion
No matter the size of your company the load of data and analytics is proportionately large. To capitalize on it to identify competitive opportunities and threats under a traditional model, greater investment in staff and resources is needed. However, even with this grand investment human error remains an ever-present threat to the validity of the data. When you use AI you remove room for human error while gaining the ability to manage big data to find trends, form predictions, and make unbiased strategic decisions.
Having a hard time connecting AI data management to your explicit needs? There are many practical uses. For example, if inventory management is a part of your daily or weekly operations you’ll be pleased to know that AI can be used to more efficiently track inventory and make calculated recommendations regarding which items should be replenished based on season, pricing trends, recent consumer behavior, and more. This shelf intelligence replaces human assumptions and is just one example of how AI is revolutionizing the entire supply chain.
4. Automating Operations
The execution of mundane tasks often results in wasted (could be applied elsewhere) resource hours, but these tasks cannot be ignored as they may be critical. Given that AI can used to automate practically any business activity you can move hours away from accounting, manufacturing, email campaigns, and so forth. Those hours can then be put towards better customer/client engagement and previously untapped revenue acquisition initiatives, those that were uncovered by AI data and analytics management in the first place.
As mentioned, while the extent to which artificial intelligence can be leveraged for a given brand depends upon industry type, there is no organization that cannot benefit from AI. If it can be
used to save the global giraffe population, it can certainly solve your challenges too. It’s an exciting time for corporate technology and those that embrace the developments will gain a clear competitive advantage. To find out how AI can be applied to your unique business
contact Fully Managed.