Nowadays, Everyone knows about AI But How Artificial Intelligence Has been Used in Business So Far? Let’s take a brief look at that.
Customer Service Filter
Answering Basic Questions
A good portion of a customer service representative’s time is spent dealing with the most basic questions. The problem with the most basic questions is that they are repetitive and have the same answers.
Companies have invested in artificial intelligence as a way of removing the most basic questions needing attention from human customer service representatives. This allows customer service representatives to handle more serious cases and respond quickly to customers dealing with more problematic situations. It’s a good way to use artificial intelligence in business.
Correct Redirecting
Including the most basic questions, a common reoccurrence for customer service representatives is simply answering where something can be found on the website. When you have a website as large as, maybe, Amazon then you have a lot of areas where content is buried underneath what is usually used by the common customer.
In Business, Artificial intelligence can pick up on keywords in the phrase such as “can you help me find” in order to redirect the user to what they need. Like handling the most basic questions, redirecting customers that are simply lost on the website saves customer service representative time.
Offering Products as Solutions
In addition to this, maybe the customer is looking for something that isn’t obvious. Along with redirecting the customer, if a customer is looking for a specific product of yours but can’t find it then they will able to redirect them to the appropriate product.
Since products usually complement each other in a company environment, this is often the best time to bring up additional software for sale or other products that complement what they were originally looking for. As this happens in almost immediate timing for the customer, the customer is not ready to defend themselves against a sales pitch and so they will usually check out the additional product. That’s how artificial intelligence uses in the retail business.
Immediate Gratification
Due to the fact that artificial intelligence can handle as many people as you want it to, that means that waiting lines are significantly reduced. Instead of that frustration building up as they wait 30 minutes on the phone, the artificial intelligence is able to immediately gratify their needs.
In addition to this, artificial intelligence is less likely to make mistakes. Provided the artificial intelligence is built sufficiently, it will be able to handle the customer’s needs without misinterpreting the words of the customer. This is a point of contention amongst customer service representatives that primarily deals with demographic locations and how things are said amongst individuals. The artificial intelligence can recognize the pattern of words and determine the meaning based off of a database rather than personal experience.
More Satisfied Customer
By being able to handle customer service issues in a very quick manner, the customer normally leaves the discussion satisfied with the result. In the past, when customers had to wait to be seen by Representatives even though they may have paid a premium price, the lack of instant gratification often led to resentment with certain customer service agencies. One that comes to mind as a particular example is the Comcast customer service line, which was considered to be one of the worst for nearly half a decade simply because of mistakes and the amount of time that you had to wait.
Definitely, artificial intelligence can improve customer satisfaction in the business. Customers that are satisfied with the customer service experience are less likely to leave and more likely to stay on your platform, which means they are more likely to purchase items on your platform.
Detecting Fraud
Zip Code Detection
One of the easiest artificial intelligence implementations for security fraud is the detection of the common zip code. When a customer makes a purchase, they usually stay within the immediate area that they are in. ZIP codes that are outside of that area are normally very difficult to detect by human beings.
By having artificial intelligence in business constantly looking at the account, it is able to detect when a customer makes a purchase that is outside of their zip code. It is then able to make an assessment as to whether the zip code in which the item was purchased is valid given the user’s past travel experience. For instance, a person in Cape Coral is very likely to purchase something in Miami every odd once in a while but that same person in Cape Coral is very unlikely to purchase something in Maryland for 500 times the cost. This brings up the next security fraud detection measure put into place by artificial intelligence.
Out-Of-Habit Detection
When it comes to artificial intelligence in business, things are grouped together in categories. When security specialists talk about out of habit behaviour with financial data, they are usually talking about a three-category system. The first category is conservative, the second category is mixed, and the final category is extravagant or whatever word you want to use to describe blowing all your money. You can detect whether a person is conservative or not by looking at the amount of money they make versus the amount of money they spend as well as whether that money goes to bills or luxuries. By being able to understand the regular spending habits of an individual, a person who is normally conservative is not likely to spend something that is 50 to 100 times the amount they would normally spend. However, if they buy tech-related items that are usually expensive, but it happens at a very low frequency then the account would likely consider that a tech purchase that is 50 times the amount that they would normally spend is a valid purchase because of the spending habits of the individual.
Read: Micro Financing using Artificial Intelligence in Business
Falsifying Credentials
For a very long time, gas stations and security buildings have shared one thing in common. There is always a credential check for whenever you want to do something that requires a special privilege. At a gas station, you are required to provide credentials whenever you purchase things like alcohol and cigarettes. Security buildings, this is more likely to deal with access to certain parts of the building as well as items in that building.
The problem with credential checking is that it was often done by the human eye, which is scientifically proven to be one of the most unreliable devices for scientific measurement. However, with the invention of scanners and artificial intelligence, we no longer need to rely on the human eye to make credential checking more secure. In addition to this, these machines can keep up with current law whereas the security professional in the front is likely to lag behind the law for a few months and, sometimes, never actually update until they’re caught in the wrong.
Facial Recognition
In addition to credentials that you might find on a card, some businesses have begun using your face as a credential. It’s not very widespread because such a credential can be faked provided you have a highly optimized picture in front of the camera, but the technology is getting much more advanced as time goes on.
For instance, artificial intelligence can already detect movement patterns within the face and take those as additional parameters. By knowing whether the eyes are moving, a common human reflex, artificial intelligence would be able to determine the difference between a picture and a human. Facial recognition is far harder to fake, should we get to the point where it’s as good as artificial credential checking, that it will likely replace credential checking as we know it.
Security Threat Analysis
The last bit is more of an ethical issue right now as many people are trying to fight it as companies are attempting to find ways to determine the behaviour of an individual. For instance, a person who is likely going to kill someone in the building is going to be in an off mood compared to their regular attitude at the company.
However, there’s an additional side to this and that is the average security audit that is done by the individual. Security audits determine the weak points inside of a building. Artificial intelligence in business is slowly being able to detect the same security holes in a building that a security audit would normally provide but at a much cheaper cost. This is still a relatively new technology and it’s not quite as common as the previously mentioned artificial intelligence, but it does exist.
User Data Abstraction
Automate Meetings
In the past, we have usually set up meetings on a daily or weekly plan. In fact, one could say that an hour spent on meetings every day amounts to an entire day wasted at the end of the week. The problem is that meetings happen when nobody really needs to have a meeting.
By being able to understand what is going on in the work environment and on the product, meetings can be assigned based on data of current problems needing to be solved. The only real need for a meeting is to ensure that everyone has a collective understanding, but most of everyone in a company has that understanding as they work throughout the week. It’s only when something needs to be changed about a work process or a user problem that everyone goes on to their own page. By using user-generated data, one can assess whether there should be a meeting or that time allotted to the meeting should go to work, which saves time and thus money.
Product Failure Predictions
The most common way to detect whether a product is going to fail or not is the amount of negative feedback that a product gets. It is very easy to determine a good product from a bad product when good products get four to five stars and bad products get zero to one star.
What artificial intelligence can do is look at the feedback given in the reviews to determine whether there is a product that is going to start failing because of unheard complaints. Instead of looking at just the numbers on the rating sheet, artificial intelligence can collect negative commenting versus positive commenting. As negative commenting is more expressive of an issue and is a real evaluation of the product, artificial intelligence can provide a much more accurate depiction of succeeding and failing products.
Customer Service Refinement
A lot of time is wasted in the customer service industry because common problems keep popping up. Every problem that a customer has can usually be fixed in some way and the more time spent in customer service, the less time the customer is buying your products from you.
By assessing product value and the complaints associated with the products, one can make changes to the product that prevent such complaints. By paying attention to the interactions in customer service, one can generally find where common problems are and remove them from the equation. This allows the company to make more money and to waste less money on customer service representatives for handling basic items.
Website Leads Success
Another area that artificial intelligence succeeds at is determining whether your website pages lead customers to the results that you want. While there are common technologies like heat mapping in the world of front-end development and marketing, artificial intelligence can easily quantify which pages are working and which pages are not based on that information. However, it goes a step further by making predictive guesses on what has worked in the past and what is currently failing so that it can predict what your best design would probably be like and so you don’t waste time in revisional steps.
Potential Products
The last part of artificial intelligence that can help a company out in is in products that the company would not have thought of beforehand. Oftentimes, ideas for products come out of nowhere or are based on a logical progression of the evolution of another product.
However, artificial intelligence can pick up on lines like “I think I would like to see this” or “it’s too bad that you don’t have this”. Lines like these are usually suggestions by the customer about products that you could provide and make money off of, but they get lost in the customer representative area because it’s not normally the responsibility of customer representatives to report ideas to higher management.
Predicting Area Failures
Machinery Repair Cycles
We all know that machines need to be regulated on a constant basis to make sure that they are working as efficiently as they can possibly be, but the estimates we usually give are kind of standard. For instance, a mechanic will tell you that you need to change the oil in your car in the next 3000 miles or six months. However, this standardization is really just a factor of how often you drive a car. It is not taking in the fact that you might only use the car once every 6 months and so, if that’s the case, you might not need to have your oil switched out.
In business, Artificial intelligence can pay attention to every single mechanical repair that is done in the company and then utilize readings to determine repair cycle. For instance, if the company printer is out of ink between 35 and 37 days, the artificial intelligence can determine that you need to order a new ink cartridge on a regular basis based off of that.
It might be easy for a single human to make that schedule, but what if everyone has a printer at their desk? What if you had 50 employees with their own printers, all of which were purchased at different times? This becomes a problem for even a team of people to keep track of if it’s not kept track of every time you buy a printer. With artificial intelligence, you simply notify it that there is a new printer in the system it needs to keep track of and then it learns what it takes for that printer to have a problem. This was a really basic example, but this can be done with large technology or industrial machines.
Nonoptimal Production
In addition to this, artificial intelligence can detect when a machine is not moving at the rate that it should within the nanosecond. In a factory, you generally know what’s going on by extremely basic sensors, that are already built into the system, that have thresholds. However, if those same sensors were allowed access to artificial intelligence, the recognition of optimal working speed would be within the nanosecond.
The reason why this is important is that noticing a few nanoseconds of change that continuously change for the worse allows for more of a preventable time window for issues that could essentially shut down the entire factory. As an example, a heat gun might be off by a few nano degrees and it is slowly getting worse. Something like this normally has an internal sensor that can go bad because of overheating, but artificial intelligence would tell you that the sensor was bad and, if you installed a separate measure, it would also tell you that the heating gun was getting too hot or too cold thus creating bad products. Instead of producing bad products for, potentially, thousands of units you instead have the ability to lose maybe a lot of 10 before finding out about this issue and taking care of it.
Customer Patterns
Humans are incredibly predictable about what they will and won’t do. This means that since you can predict human behavior, you can record customer patterns on your website and in your stores.
Oftentimes, security cameras are only used to ensure that someone is caught on camera in the case of criminal activity. However, if you use a kernel algorithm that determines populated congregation, you can find areas of the store that are rarely visited by individuals. You can also find areas that are highly visited by individuals and then you can make an associated decision to bring the lesser seen parts of the store towards the parts of the store that are popular, which increases the likelihood that those products will be sold.
While you can perform this artificial algorithm on a single video, a programmer would not be able to create renditions of a 24-hour format that showed you the locations of everyone in the store if you had more than 6 cameras. It is a mathematical monument a single person just can’t climb and is difficult for even a team. However, an artificial algorithm and an artificial intelligence would be able to watch and make recordings of all video at the same time and produce those results onto a map of the store as it is covered by the cameras. This allows for an extremely accurate targeting of redistributing products for sale.
Website Security Holes
Website security is not really taken seriously until you get to about 120,000 customers. This is usually the range at which hackers become a little bit more involved in trying to get the information out of your database. That isn’t to say that there won’t be attacks before that, but usually, those are bot networks trying to get admin access or hackers that just happened to find your website.
However, due to the common practices of a hacker, you can use artificial intelligence to find security holes in your business website. As I already mentioned, at the lower levels, bot networks will try to access your admin page and it will usually assume you are a WordPress website because that is the most common type of website there is. Understanding this allows a neural network developer to implement an artificial intelligence that looks for common security holes in your existing business website and website components you plan to roll out later on.
Less Used Features
Another component that artificial intelligence can handle is determining which parts of your website are not used or which parts of your product is not used. Again, these are normally handled by heatmap with front-end developers and designers as well as marketers utilizing things like heat maps. However, the problem with utilizing heatmaps is that you have to check this on a constant basis as to whether your website is still being used the way you want it to be used.
This means that you have to keep someone hired that can understand how this component of marketing works and, essentially, waste time on a repetitive task. Instead, to save money, you can develop artificial intelligence that will keep track of all the heat maps since its creation and beyond to determine what customers will be more likely to use in your product than what you have now. Not only will it determine where you should place things on the website, but if you have a program like Photoshop then there might be a classification of tools because of their location and the difficulty in understanding them. In business, artificial intelligence would be able to keep track of every component on both the website and in the product and provide you with reports on that information without you having to pay someone to do it by hand, which would usually take much longer.
Massive Monitoring
Production Output
As previously mentioned, artificial intelligence is really good at noticing oddities inside of your work line. Provided that you feed artificial intelligence the right information, you can actually find slow parts of a production line and determine which problems that production line part is experiencing that causes it to be slow.
Part of ensuring that you can keep as much output as high as possible is also ensuring that you are constantly removing the parts that are slow. Artificial intelligence can keep track of the entire system and directly tell you what is slow and even can suggest how to fix it. It’s a lot faster than human conducted evaluations and a lot less error-prone.
Worker Health
You’ve likely seen someone in the minimum wage industry that should be home because they’re sick but they’re not at home because they can’t afford it. Worker health is caused by a few factors. You’ve got possible contamination in the air, possible contamination from worker to worker, possible contamination between customer to the worker, and the possible contamination of the product. The only part that you cannot measure is when the worker leaves to go home.
By having air quality sensors that can detect what’s in the air by volume and infrared sensors as well as microscopic sensors to detect what’s on surfaces, one can utilize artificial intelligence to ensure a company’s area is less likely to make a worker sick. A worker being sick means that a customer could have a bad experience, a product could leave the warehouse in a lot and be infected and grow in the environment that it is put in, or the company has to suffer monetary loss as a result of sending the worker home on sick leave. By ensuring the quality of the company area, most of these issues can be avoided.
Sales Versus Market Trends
There are certain market trends that directly affect the sales of a company. For instance, when Apple releases a new iPhone, there is a high possibility that the previous generations of iPhone will all get cheaper. If you sell a competitor phone that competes with one of those older generations of iPhone, you will undoubtedly feel this in your sales when that iPhone is released.
This is just a simple example, but you can usually tell that a product is about to release because the company will receive a huge increase in their market just before they release so that everyone can cash in on the sales of that new product before they cash out. Noticing these trends is quite difficult because the stock market has over 500 companies. However, an artificial intelligence can make short work of such an issue and would be able to notify the sales team that something might occur given a certain company’s market price. This allows you to develop a plan of action before your sales see a hit.
Customer Service Speed
In business, Artificial intelligence is really good at handling basic necessities of everyday human life. Customer service is what served this purpose before this purpose got handed over to artificial intelligence. An incredible amount of time is wasted at customer service on redirecting the user to the part of the website where the product that they want currently resides. An enormous amount of time is wasted on customers that are asking simple questions such as “where is the pricing” and “where are your other products”. If you have a website that is not particularly navigation friendly, customer service is usually the one that steps in to help customers navigate the website until the problem is fixed.
Artificial intelligence can take their place based off of what they use as answers and, in addition to that, artificial intelligence can notify you that there is a problem concerning a specific part of a specific page. By handling basic issues, artificial intelligence allows customer service not to be bogged down by rudimentary tasks and allows them to take care of the more agitated customers that are dealing with more complex issues.
Customer Acquisition Rates
By incorporating these measures, one can ensure that products are delivered on time, products match the quality expectation of the customer, and that problems are solved on a timely basis according to customer expectation. If another customer experiences a better product with a different company, they are likely to leave your company as a result. If another customer likes your products but tries not to buy them on a regular basis because they don’t like how long customer service takes, changing how you handle customer service would revolutionize those customers.
All of this boils down to being able to keep customers longer, make more money off of them, and increase the amount of money you make overall by optimizing every part of your company.
Read: Different Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is often underneath the eye of scrutiny because of how much information it requires to be useful. For a long time, many people have harkened the visage of artificial intelligence to that of the Terminator movies where they eventually get so smart that they annihilate the human race. Artificial intelligence is nowhere near that because as we can see with Google Voice, the number of problems we have to correct with a simple language recognition program should prove just how far from this point we are as a society. We have several different implementations of artificial intelligence but almost every single one of them is rudimentary compared to the necessity that is needed to make it a threat.
In Business, Artificial intelligence is a low-cost investment that ultimately brings out some of the best results that money can buy. You only need access to mathematics and the data for artificial intelligence to become useful. This means that any business from the lowest level to the highest level you can get the same high-quality data and predictions needed to propel their business forward. Artificial intelligence, rudimentary as it may be, ultimately benefits us as companies and as a society as we push forward with advancements into this new technology. Don’t be afraid to use it and get the advantage while it’s still an advantage.
