As the founder of a startup, you might not have given a lot of thought to using artificial intelligence (AI) in your budding business. But while you might envision AI as some futuristic robot-like experience, in reality, you are probably using this type of technology all of the time — from asking Siri for directions to the local pizza place to seeing suggested friends or posts on social media. As it turns out, there are a number of ways that you can use AI to help your startup to flourish and meet its many goals. Check out the following ideas:
1. AI Can Help Boost Sales
By using AI in your startup, you can put it to work monitoring your many tasks, including your phone calls and emails. AI will then know what you have in the works for your company and help you to keep tabs on everything. For example, when AI becomes a sales assistant of sorts, it reminds you to do certain tasks and follow up with people at a specific time — and as a result, important day to day jobs will not get lost in the shuffle.
2. AI and Customer Service
Historically, companies will not know how happy customers are unless they speak up. If clients don’t state their dissatisfaction with a company, the owner will never know anything is wrong. But as Salesforce notes, AI can help notice clues and signals that you and your team might miss that can indicate how satisfied your customers are with your service and products. AI can find correlations and feelings in customer data and help identify which people may be dissatisfied; once you know who these people are, you can take steps to try to win them back.
3. AI and Privacy
Your startup is probably already handling a great deal of sensitive data, from customer information to credit card numbers and more. While you want to store and access this data in a safe way, you might be reluctant to turn it over to the cloud. Qualcomm’s artificial intelligence platform is designed to not only make devices work in a smarter way, but also reliably and privately. Snapdragon-powered AI platforms are able to run exclusively on a device without the cloud; in addition to helping with privacy issues, this will also help the devices to use bandwidth more effectively. Looking to the future, mobile platforms will also be able to support wireless technologies like Gigabit LTE and the upcoming 5G, which makes it an excellent investment that your startup can use for some time.
4. Consider a Chatbot
Many business owners start by dipping their toes into the proverbial AI pool by giving a related phone service a try. Most of us have had a conversation with a chatbot on the phone who is able to answer simple questions, look up accounts and more. While customers may still want to speak with you or your team some of the time, chatbots can help free up your employees’ time by being able to handle basic calls. Chatbots can be especially helpful during busy times of the workday or to help connect callers with other members in the department.
Once you implement AI in your startup in a few basic ways, you will probably be on the lookout for other tasks that it can take on. While you still want your customers to enjoy friendly interactions with your sales team, AI will handle a number of daily tasks with ease, freeing up time to devote to other goals.