Artificial Intelligence In Business: Top 5 AI & ML Trends Of 2018

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) might seem like heavy terms to take in! Even you might feel that these are things of the future and not the present. To tell you the truth, it is not! In fact, artificial intelligence in business is ‘the’ trend of 2018 and is actually a technology which we are using on a daily basis!

Not convinced yet? Here are a few daily life examples we’ve got for you which reflects the proactive use of AI & ML:

1. 1. Popular cab services running across the length and breadth of the country – Uber and OLA, heavily make use of ML. They make use of this technology to get a fair estimate of the ride timings and fares.
  2. Do you know how your email portals intelligently separate primary emails from spams? It’s ML! It learns your activity and behavior on your email portal and overtime starts separating emails automatically.
  3. While uploading an image on Facebook, it automatically recognizes faces of people in the image and displays their names to tag them. This is a chronic form of artificial intelligence in business.

We have just stated 3, but there are many such instances where we heavily rely on AI and ML. It is a trend and a technology to advance and stay for long! You might wonder why we are talking about this technology trend when it’s also an era of implementing low-cost marketing strategies?

AI & ML are meant for all types and kinds of businesses – big, medium and small!

Let’s introduce ourselves to AI & ML technology of 2018 before we dive deep to know the impacts of artificial intelligence in business (irrespective of its size).

What Is Artificial Intelligence In Business?

Too complicated? In simple words, AI is a scientific art of creating human-like intelligent machines.

For example, any Apple product owner is very well versed with Siri, especially at times of acute boredom. Siri is nothing but sheer AI. Apple introduced this voice interface to second the owner’s intelligence. It is a voice command that surfs through playlists, attend calls on your behalf, have entertaining conversations with you and much more.

AI can be considered as a parent concept to many baby concepts, machine learning, robotics and many more. We will emphasize on artificial intelligence and machine learning in this post.

Now that you know what AI is and different functionalities it comes along with, let’s take a close look at;

Top 5 AI Trends You Need To Inculcate In Business Now!

1. Retarget Ads On E-Commerce Sites

As a business owner, targeting the right set of audiences online is very important. Using machine learning, which is one of the most vital arenas of AI, proves to be of great advantage here. As mentioned above, ML overtime learns user habit, behavior, preference and accordingly segments them for better targeting. For e-commerce sites, ML maps your audience, studies them and assists you with clever product retargeting wherever your audience is on the worldwide web.

For example, a potential customer searched for a mobile phone on your e-commerce website. He found a good handset on your site. He checked out the price, features and other specifications of that particular handset. ML studies this behavior and further retargets him by showcasing ads or other product promotions of the same handset on other websites he goes.

Also, machine learning can be used to target your customers at the right time so that they will buy. For this, ML finds out the time they are most active online and targets them at that time.

2. Use Chatbots for Customer Service & Care

Source: Chatbots Magazine

Chat + Robot = Chatbot!

The chatbot is a software that communicates with humans through text messages, answers their questions and even performs actions when asked to. Chatbots can be integrated with your website and mobile applications externally as they:

- - Empower your employees by assisting them.
  - Stay with you round the clock for prompt customer support.
  - Promote quick customer call transfers. For example: When you call your service provider, most of the times you will hear a mechanical voice asking your perform certain actions like, press 1 for bill payments, press 2 to continue in English and so on.

Chatbots are mainly used to stay in touch with your site users at every step. It is a great customer engagement and care tool of artificial intelligence in business!

3. Convert Visitors To Customers Using CRM

AI is revolutionary when it comes to selling products to your customers! All that is needed for this revolution is your customers’ data stored in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. CRM is actually a technique that compiles customers’ information like their email, phone, & social media and their interaction with the company.

When you integrate AI tool into your company’s CRM:

1. It analyzes your customer’s data
2. So, your sales team understand your customer better
3. It predicts whether he/she will be lead or not

Source: Salesforce

In this above example, the AI tool is predicting that the customer is a lead by analyzing his personal details, interest, and activity. Now, you can turn this lead into a customer by targeting him with marketing strategies like promotional emails and various offers to increase their engagement.

4. Marketing Analytics Using AI

With artificial intelligence in businesses, you can market any of your products at a much lower budget. This is possible through AI tools that manage marketing campaigns. These tools analyze your ads’ performance on various parameters which includes reach, users, bounce rate and more. The tools also prove helpful as they suggest campaign budgets, keyword bids and so on.

Similarly, you can also pull out vital marketing metrics, for example, email sent, clicks and open rates, the best time to post, etc. This data then enables you to increase your customer database and provide the best services to them at the perfect time!

5. AI To Build Customer-Centric Products

You should know whether your customers like what you are selling or not. If not, you are missing out on ways to make your product better. Using tools of artificial intelligence in business helps you with this! For example, in the screenshot below, you can observe there are green and red tabs lined at the bottom. The tool basically alarms you with customer feedback you received for your product or service. The red tab indicates negative feedback and the green tab refers to all the positive feedback. Now that you know your product negatives and positives from your customers’ point of view, you have the potential to change all the red tabs into the green ones quickly and easily using various efficient marketing strategies.

Source: KEATEX

Leading AI Tools To Grow Your Business

So how do you include artificial intelligence in business? Some of the free and paid tools available online include:

1. Re-targeting Ads: Facebook Ads
2. Customer Service Chatbots: FlowXO (Free) and MEOKAY
3. AI-powered CRM: Salesforce Einstein and ZOHO CRM (Free)
4. Market with the expert: Conversica (Free) and Adobe Media Optimizer
5. Customer Feedback: Keatext (Free)

Call it artificial intelligence or AI, according to us it is time you introduce artificial intelligence in business strategy! It’s okay to burn money on useful AI tools than on unfruitful marketing campaigns for long. This will always keep you ahead of your competitors and also increase your cash flow tremendously. To keep up with the latest technological trends and boost your business subscribe to PayUmoney blog.