What is Artificial Intelligence?

 If asked, what is AI? A 9th grader would be quick to respond that it is the ability of machines to learn, adapt and perform tasks as a human would.

Is AI important for businesses?

Skilled AI-powered workforces, most of which are plug and play models, are readily available in the market today and your competition is probably one step ahead of you already using AI capabilities in how they work. 

Technology businesses are pushing the limits of AI and its application is growing wider and more innovative. 

AI can be used to get actionable insights into the business, handle huge data volumes, solve complex problems with high accuracy, automate tasks and improve employee efficiency. 

While large businesses are investing more in research to explore crucial business areas that can be improved with AI, a vast majority of small and medium businesses (SMBs) are yet to accelerate their rate of AI adoption. 

They face challenges in implementing AI capabilities in their processes due to barriers that are not easy to overcome – like the fear of change, a lack of digital awareness, poor technical skills and financial barriers to investing in advanced AI technology.

But it’s noteworthy that close to 60% of SMBs believe that AI is important for their business, and approximately 62% of them see it as an effective tool for their business. 

However, there are still a considerable number of businesses wary about the use of AI, not aware of how the technology has grown over time to be flexible, safer and affordable.

How to Adopt AI?

Affording an in-house technology team is one of the biggest barriers that an SMB faces. 

But now, several boutiques are specializing in building capabilities over modern AI technologies. This means that SMBs need not worry about having an in-house team to build any AI capability that they want or even having digitized data ready to get started.

Technology providers, like Nuvento, with a specialization in AI, are building products and providing services to address specific pain points – for eg, an AI-enabled chatbot for customer support, or an OCR capability to enable easier digital documentation – and this is a good enough to help SMBs get started on their digital journey. And with cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, businesses can host their entire digital framework on the security of the cloud, lowering costs and improving scalability in a go. 

To briefly go through how SMBs can get started – technology providers can implement OCR systems to digitize their paperwork. 

On these digitized documents, intelligent technology capabilities like machine learning processes, business intelligence, robotic process automation, natural language processing and cognitive learning functionalities can be applied.

These AI capabilities enable systems to continuously learn from patterns, gather insights, automate processes, understand a human’s natural language nuances and use analytical data collected to drive more insights. 

These insights can then be used to shed more light on facets of customer behavior like purchasing patterns, buyer trends engagement patterns and so on – delivering more value to the business and leading to better decision-making in a cost-efficient manner.

Even for organizations that have implemented digital capabilities partly, a specialized boutique can offer a lot more in terms of providing fully AI-enabled processes, which helps in not only reducing human error in repetitive tasks but reducing fatigue in overworked employees enabling them to concentrate more on value-adding work – improving the overall output of the business.

Delivering on Tomorrow’s Expectations

SMBs will have to face a number of roadblocks when they tap into the potential of their business. As with any size of business, they will have to evolve continuously to meet changing business expectations. 

And, by partnering with a technology provider who understands this change and customizes technology solutions to fit the evolving demand, SMBs can be sure they’ve poised themselves for winning big in the long run. 

So, are you ready for the leap to AI?