The role of AI in business

👋 Hi AI enthusiasts or AI skeptics ! The latter should be careful in this era of AI, now at its peak. It's not just a trend, but a necessity to keep pace with the times at least not to lag behind. There are hundreds of maneuvers and areas where AI easily finds its place, facilitating and streamlining many business operations. In this blog post we want to talk about how you can integrate AI tools in your business and, maybe start loving it, seeing how much of the elbow grease It takes on. Let's dive right in.

 

Automation

We have come a long way to say goodbye to manual emails that require regular attention. The journey has been longer enough to bid farewell to follow-up messages and repetitive tasks as well. No beating around the bush - there are numerous AI tools that will help you automate your everyday workflow. For example, they can generate personalized copies and send various types of emails such as welcome messages, product recommendations and newsletters based on their preferences, transactional messages and trigger-based messages like follow-ups or confirmation notes. This not only maximizes efficiency, but also significantly reduces the time spent on these tasks, allowing you to focus on creating new strategies. Consider tools such as instantly.ai, Drift, Seventh Sense. Zeta and Brevo. However the market is teeming with similar tools, with new ones popping up constantly.

For optimal results, you can integrate natural language processors like NLTK, Gensim, TextBlob, spaCY (built with Python), Stanford NLP and Apache OpenNLP (built with Java). These tools process and generate customer-friendly language, enhancing your communication. For instance, one of our projects, Formally leverages NLP to send client reminders, handle scheduling and provide a step-by-step guide for visa application in natural language.

For automating everyday workflows, Zapier is also an awesome tool to connect more than 5000 apps. Based on a trigger event (form submission, product view, new lead) Zapier initiates predefined actions in the connected apps (sending similar product recommendations, thank you messages, updating spreadsheets). So, it's a great tool for large businesses that use multiple tools and platforms, freeing up time for more strategic tasks.

 

Chatbots

Chatbots are no longer a novelty, but AI-powered chatbots that operate in a human conversation style and don't stumble on any questions bring a new level of sophistication. Whether it's customer support, product sales or recruitment, they can become a cost-effective and efficient friend to your business.

Chatbots use machine learning and NLP to recognize common patterns and natural language, ensuring the generation of satisfactory answers to the queries. With each conversation, the program enriches its knowledge, which will come in handy later on.

As mentioned earlier, AI chatbots are great for serving customers 24/7, by giving personalized responses in a few seconds and resolving non-complex issues. For small or medium businesses you can take into account the following options:

• Tidio
• Kommunicate
• Intercom
• Appy Pie
• ChatBot

If you are looking for recruiting assistants to engage in conversations, answer job-related questions, take initial interviews or handle the screenings, look into these tools:

• Paradox
• HireVue
• Ideal
• Yellow.ai

Worth noting that the market is full of options, and the list is never complete, considering the rapid development in this field.

 

Data Extraction and Report Generation

For businesses dealing with large data and requiring frequent report compilation or specific information retrieval, using relevant AI tools will definitely be a source of great happiness. These tools can help analyze and interpret various formats of documents and even visuals to extract particular data points or information, depending on the requirements. Apart from data extraction, they can be integrated to produce detailed or generic reports and summaries of documents,  the format of which can vary, including textual summaries, charts, graphs, or interactive dashboards, based on the intended purpose. For example, in one of our projects Digsite, a research tool, ChatGPT is integrated to generate reports for given surveys and their results. Consider leveraging the following tools for data extraction and report generation:

• Kofax
• ABBYY
• Google Cloud Document AI
• Acodis
• WPS AI

 

Analytics

Analytics play a pivotal role in any business. Luckily, just like any other aspect of business, with the advent of technology and artificial intelligence, manual efforts have given their place to faster, more accurate and more consistent machine work. You need not worry even if you are not a data analyst, as everything - from providing a complete overview of your business to identifying common patterns and predicting potential scenarios - is now handled by the machine. You will gain insights into vast data within seconds in an unbiased and orderly way. Additionally, with predictive AI, you can get future perceptions, understanding where your marketing and sales efforts are leading you. Here are some amazing AI tools for data analytics:

• Microsoft Power BI
• Polymer
• IBM Watson Studio
• Azure Machine Learning
• Google Cloud AI Platform
• RapidMiner

The last four software options are great for predictive AI.

For those looking for no-coding platforms, consider:

• Tableau
• MonkeyLearn
• Akkio
• Sisense