With artificial intelligence (AI) growing in popularity and use cases, businesses of every size are in search of ways to leverage the technology. While many examples of AI in business come from multinational companies, many solutions are affordable and versatile enough for small businesses to use as well.
Existing programs that small businesses rely on, such as Podium, have even developed AI tools that can support business growth. Podium is an all-in-one software system that includes communication channels, phones, payments, reviews, and more. And it also features an AI Assistant for businesses that want to get the most out of automation.
Try out Podium’s conversational AI, it’s outcome driven! It doesn’t just respond to inbound leads it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business.
Uses of AI in Business: 11 Examples
As AI continues to grow, the possibilities for the technology’s business applications increase as well. For now, the following are some of the most common AI in business examples that small businesses should consider following.
1. Customer Service and Support
Customer service and support make up some of the most popular uses of AI in business, as the technology can dramatically reduce the burden of manual work on your support team. Through AI, you can automate many aspects of customer support workflows, especially when combined with chatbots.
But even without chatbots, AI can make customer communication faster and easier by organizing messages. This lets your team provide more efficient support and ensures they have the information they need while providing that support.
Overall, the uses of AI in business show a trend of enhancing customer support from humans, not replacing it. Automation, for example, gives your team more time to spend working closely with customers on complex issues or queries. Or AI in a CRM platform can automate and speed up repetitive tasks while reducing the risk of human error.
2. Data Analysis and Insights
Across all industries, artificial intelligence is used to analyze vast amounts of data that would be impractical for humans to manually study. From customer conversations to shipping information to the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, all this data provides you with insights to improve your business and its efficiency. Big data and AI let algorithms quickly evaluate data sets, with this process automation saving a great deal of time.
3. Personalization and Recommendation Engines
Personalization and recommendation engines are among the most popular AI in business examples. Anyone who has ever shopped online has seen personalized product recommendations based on their browsing history. Even if you don’t shop online, you likely see targeted ads with personalized recommendations.
These recommendations are based on artificial intelligence and are the result of analyzing your behavior online as well as your past purchases. Offering this type of personalization improves the customer experience by making it easier for shoppers to find what they need. It also makes them feel more valued, and most customers want some level of personalization when shopping.
4. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
As mentioned, chatbots and virtual assistants can overlap with AI’s business uses for customer support. This type of automation can free up your team to handle more complex interactions with customers. Virtual assistants and chatbots can essentially create an interactive FAQ section that resolves the simplest customer queries. You can even use it for simple workflows, such as collecting customer information.
For example, you can make your website a conversation starter with a web chat widget that interacts with website visitors as they browse your products. You can even use it to gather leads that you then reach out to via text or email marketing. Try Podium to see Webchat in action on your site.
You can even turn chatbots into personal assistants with AI. For example, you can use a virtual assistant on your website to recommend products to customers based on their answers to a few questions. If you sell a physical product, you can use virtual assistants to help customers place orders. For businesses selling services, use virtual assistants to schedule appointments or send reminders.
Podium’s AI Employee guarantees your business engages with leads within a couple of minutes; during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between.
5. Marketing and Advertising
Another major application of AI in business is in marketing, especially personalized marketing. The same data and AI analysis that offers recommendations to your customers can apply segmentation to your customer list for your advertising campaigns. It will also let you show customers specific products in advertising.
For example, if they view a specific product on your website, such as a particular shirt, you can use AI to show them that same shirt in an ad when browsing another website.
But this isn’t as simple as just showing ads for a product your website visitors looked at. Using artificial intelligence in business lets you analyze a combination of the items they viewed, links they clicked, and items they added to and removed from their carts. This allows for a higher level of personalization and ad targeting.
6. Natural Language Processing (NLP) Applications
NLP applications are crucial when dealing with chatbots or virtual assistants. You want customers to be able to use natural or conversational language instead of having to use specific keywords. This makes interacting with your business much easier for your customers, improving their experience. AI has made steady advances in this aspect.
7. Fraud Detection and Security
There are numerous security applications of artificial intelligence for business. AI systems can detect fraudulent activities or potential security threats. Banks already use AI and machine learning models to detect potentially fraudulent transactions in real-time.
They can rely on facial recognition to give your team access to software. You can even incorporate facial recognition into fraud prevention technology or add it to marketing efforts, such as letting your customers virtually try on your product.
8. Supply Chain and Logistics Optimization
Supply chains and logistics are another important area for artificial intelligence for business. Artificial intelligence can optimize various aspects of logistics, looking for ways to reduce the time spent in transit. Even in the rare cases that optimization isn’t possible, AI can at least give you accurate estimates of when materials or products will arrive.
9. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is one of the examples of AI in CRM systems that can improve the customer experience and supplement your support team. Artificial intelligence can use CRM data as well as other information to analyze customer conversations and figure out how customers feel. From there, your sales and marketing teams can adjust their approach or even make recommendations based on the customer’s sentiments. Sentiment analysis can also help measure customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
10. Lead Scoring and Nurturing
After you gather leads from webchat or another source, AI can help you score leads and nurture relationships with them. The system can use your past data to see what characteristics previously converted leads have and then score similar leads higher. Or it can respond to your direct input on what improves a lead’s score.
From there, AI and automation can begin nurturing those leads with text or email campaigns. These can use a combination of templates and personalization to deliver results without any ongoing effort from your team.
11. Predictive Maintenance
Assuming your business uses appliances or machinery, then you can also use AI for predictive maintenance. It can look at sensor data, weather data, and historical use data and then combine that with maintenance schedules. Predictive maintenance is important as it prevents your equipment from prematurely breaking down, which could lead to financial losses from downtime.
AI Tools for Business
To get a better idea of how your small business can use AI, consider the following AI tools for marketing and business that let you embrace this technology.
1. Podium
Podium’s AI Assistant saves you time, improves the customer experience, and helps you convert more leads to drive business growth—faster. The assistant lets you complete tasks, such as gathering reviews from satisfied customers, in half the time. Those reviews will improve your online reputation and help you bring in more customers.
The AI Assistant also gathers leads, automatically pulling them from various websites and putting them into your Podium CRM. This will put them alongside your DMs, texts, and calls. This automation and AI tool then sends pre-approved automatic responses within two minutes, letting you beat your competitors to reach the lead.
No matter your method of acquiring a lead, the AI Assistant lets you respond twice as fast while still sounding like a human, thanks to NLP. You can even customize responses or bulk-send them depending on your preferences and audience.
Podium’s AI Assistant works across nearly all Podium features in surprising ways. For example, combined with Phones, you get automated summaries of your phone calls. This prevents your team from missing crucial information even if they forgot to jot it down.
The AI Assistant can also craft text marketing templates. It can combine that with customer history and industry analysis to personalize the templates or create new ones.
Contact Podium for a demo today. Paid plans range between $249/month-$599/month.
2. LogRhythm
LogRhythm focuses on delivering AI cybersecurity solutions. It detects threats and responds to incidents using artificial intelligence. One of the most convenient features of this platform is that it is self-evolving. This means that it constantly improves its ability to detect and analyze threats as those threats advance. This reduces the workload on your IT team or potentially even the need for a cybersecurity team depending on the size of your business.
This platform is available at by-quote pricing.
3. Eightfold AI
Eightfold AI is a popular recruiting tool that helps you find talent for your job openings. The tool analyzes resumes to find the skills that you want. It also gives your team advice for their career paths, encouraging them to stay with your company. Remember that retaining talent typically costs less and is better for morale compared to regularly hiring new employees.
Interested users can contact the vendor for information on pricing.
4. Textio
Textio uses NLP AI for recruiting. It helps your recruiting team create content that attracts talent to your company. The AI in Textio is particularly useful at eliminating confusing jargon and biased words. The result is job listings that are more appealing to your ideal candidate. With Textio, your team can create effective job ads in just minutes.
You can get in touch with the vendor for a demo and pricing information.
4 Real-World AI in Business Examples
Now that you have a better idea of how you can use AI in your small business, it’s time to take a look at how companies have already put artificial intelligence to use. While these examples are mostly from multinational companies, they should still provide inspiration as – similar situations could be surprisingly affordable when implemented on a smaller scale.
1. Meta
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, uses DeepText to add structure to unstructured data. DeepText is an engine designed to analyze and understand text. It automatically understands the content as well as the emotional sentiment of posts across languages.
Meta also uses DeepFace as AI facial recognition technology. This is responsible for the platform’s ability to spot you in photos that were uploaded. There is also AI tech to automatically remove images from social media that violate Meta’s policies, such as revenge porn.
2. Google
Looking at Google will show you numerous examples of AI technology in action. The one you may be most familiar with is Google Duplex. This is an AI voice interface that uses NMLP to schedule appointments and make phone calls.
An AI example comes from another company of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Waymo is the self-driving technology division, and it originally began as a Google project. The goal behind Waymo is to perfect and expand self-driving technology. The company envisions a future where more people rely on self-driving technology to get from point A to point B while reducing crashes.
Currently, Waymo has autonomous vehicles serving as taxis in California. As this is still a pilot program, there is still a human driver behind the wheel as backup and there is no charge.
Another example from Google and Alphabet is DeepMind. The company reinforced its dedication to deep learning and AI. The DeepMind system has already created the first AI Go player that beat a professional Go player, a program called AlphaGo. And its system learned 49 Atari games.
3. Apple
Apple’s best-known example of AI technology is Siri, the smart assistant available across nearly all Apple devices. Siri was the clear leader in the world of AI assistants on smartphones and has since spread across the full Apple lineup.
Some other examples of AI in Apple products include:
- FaceID (facial recognition)
- Song recommendations on Apple Music
- Apple Maps, including navigation
- Finding photos on iCloud
4. IBM
IBM has always been a big name in AI, with its Deep Blue computer beating a world champion at chess two decades ago. Its Watson computer also won on Jeopardy.
IBM’s most recent AI project is Project Debater. This is a cognitive computing engine that developed human-like arguments when arguing with two professional debaters.
Leverage AI and Get the Most Out of Automation with Podium
The simplest and most effective way to get the most out of automation and AI is with Podium’s AI Assistant. It lets you automate lead generation, build relationships with leads, and even send review requests. It even automatically takes notes on phone calls for you.
AI Assistant not only improves workflows, but it also improves customer communications and business growth. Business growth comes from your enhanced ability to attract and retain customers via the combination of AI features. It truly is the AI Assistant that drives business growth – faster.
AI in Business FAQs
Q: How is AI used in business?
A: AI is used in business in many ways, such as gathering and analyzing data, gauging audience sentiment, automating communications, and personalizing messaging and ads. It can also be used behind the scenes for logistics, predictive maintenance, and other types of forecasting. All industries can use AI, from healthcare to commerce to restaurants.
Q: What are the four types of AI with examples?
A: The four types of AI are self-aware, theory of mind, limited memory, and reactive. Limited-memory AI includes autonomous vehicles. Reactive AI examples include Netflix or Amazon recommendations, spam filters, and Deep Blue. Theory of mind AI and self-aware AI have not been created yet. Theory of mind AI will have decision-making abilities that are close to humans and self-aware AI will be able to recognize its emotions and have intelligence and consciousness similar to that of humans.
Q: What are some examples of AI?
A: Some examples of AI include autonomous vehicles, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, fraud detection, and personalized shopping recommendations on e-commerce websites.
