Which companies can Artificial Intelligence help?

Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way in which companies relate to their customers, how work is managed, the talent of employees, how operations are optimized, how new digital products and services are developed...

It is a technology that can be applied to all sectors in particular. As we know, all human activities leave numbers and data from which we can draw some kind of useful conclusion either to improve processes or to make them more accurate or even to make them faster and more efficient. 

According to the Accenture's "Built to Scale" reportIn Spain, 70% of Spanish executives believe that a further step must be taken for AI to have an impact on their business strategy. The main applications of AI are IA are that of product customization to provide a solution much more tailored to the customer's needs.

In general everything related to eliminating, where they are used for example in cybersecurity to anticipate hacker attacks, in fraud prevention, image recognition, risk analysis ... but above all to eliminate barriers and pain points to the customer.

So, it is a technology that can be applied to all sectors. As we know, all human activities leave numbers and data from which we can draw some kind of useful conclusion either to improve the processes or to make them more cost-effective or even to make them faster and more efficient. 

Pain areas of application of AI in companies

Although there are a number of near-term applications, small and medium-sized businesses can take advantage of AI in the following areas:

1. Marketing: The algorithms of machine learning that collect endless data from people, can be used for sales to offer a personalized experience to our customers. Today, one of the most lucrative activities of Artificial Intelligence is that AI algorithms look for patterns, trends to elaborate and plan more effective business strategies thanks to the analysis and categorization of information.
2. Task automation: 50% of a company's actions are repetitive, i.e., they are perfectly defined processes, and there are even jobs where 100% of their activities could be automated. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence or RPA algorithms will complement the tasks of human beings, freeing up time and resources. In this way, AI helps streamline administrative tasks allowing humans to focus on more interesting and creative work. Freeing employees from simple tasks can help them make better use of their efforts and talents for the business.
3. Data Analysis: In the midst of the Big Data boom, today's companies work with large amounts of data from which much more information can be obtained than ever before. This requires algorithms and AI companies capable of obtaining, sorting and analyzing this unstructured data and transforming it into useful information for the business.
4. Customer service: In the e-commerce sector, it is increasingly common that several companies are incorporating chatbots on their websites. In this way, a virtual assistance service is offered, complete in real time, where most companies are focusing on perfecting these digital tools to improve customer service.
5. Improve the efficiency of business processes: Improving daily operations can help your business grow faster, and machine learning algorithms are designed to do just that. By using them, you can analyze systems such as supply chains, workflows or identify areas of improvement or mistakes that are being made. The operation of any company's area generates a certain lack of knowledge that prevents us from seeing where we are failing or where we are wasting resources. As mentioned in the previous point, processes can be optimized to have an optimized workflow avoiding all manual and repetitive tasks to increase human resources to increase production capacity and reduction of production materials as is the case in the production sector industry. 

It is very important that your company already starts to get involved in Artificial Intelligence. Make sure that the first steps in preparing for the future involve these types of topics. 

The reality is that all of these technologies exist but have not been fully developed. According to a EY's report on Artificial Intelligence in SpainIn the case of the public sector, only between 15% and 20% of Spanish companies have passed the pilot testing stage and points out that the public sector in Spain is far from extracting the full potential of this technology. The key for this technology to take off is to be very clear about which use cases make sense in your company, which are in favor of the customer and which have a responsible use.

For this, it is necessary to have professionals who know what they are doing and one of the important aspects is the interdisciplinary training, since to develop a good Artificial Intelligence strategy there are two fundamental aspects. Firstly, it is necessary to have a dataset or a data bank that is sufficiently structured and clean to be able to do something with it; and secondly, to establish the problem or specific use case to be solved in the appropriate way.

And that requires not only people in the industry who know AI, but people in the industry who understand how AI tools, algorithms and the whole computational basis work to apply them to the specific use case.

The Artificial Intelligence is an opportunity for all of us because we are really lucky that no matter what sector we are in, with a little training and a change of mentality, we can have access to a type of data and a type of training that was not possible before. What we have to think about is that our work is going to change no matter what we do progressively, so we have to learn more about this technology and see it as an opportunity to exploit our business data.