What is AI in business?

Artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses a plethora of different machine tools that are on the market at the moment, which can benefit your business if you know how to use them. You might be familiar with tools like ChatGPT, for instance, which uses artificial intelligence to generate text based on inputted prompts.

AI is increasingly becoming a popular means to automate and streamline various different business processes, create content, improve customer service and provide insight via analytics. Businesses use different AI tools on the market to achieve these aims, as there is no one-size-fits-all solution. 

For example, you might use a tool like ChatGPT to generate text that you can use for a blog post or to create SEO-optimised job descriptions that are able to reach the right candidates. However, you’ll need a different AI tool such as Tableau to create reports and data visualisations. 

These types of tools use machine learning (ML). This means that you can ‘train’ them on different data sets, so they are potentially able to learn from the information that you provide and therefore generate more relevant data or content on the basis of what you feed them. AI machine learning is useful for businesses looking to gain deeper insights into large, complex data. It can be used to analyse employee performance, manage projects and provide other kinds of analytics feedback.

Training your staff in AI

If you plan to be an early adopter of AI, it is a good idea to look at training your staff in the right skills to use it. Some AI tools require deep learning and machine learning (for when you want to analyse large data sets), so your staff can benefit from understanding how to appropriately use different types of AI. If you’re looking to build an AI chatbot from scratch, then you’ll need to look at hiring or training staff in the right skills to do this.

Not all tools will be useful to your staff, so it’s best to assess what tools will be helpful to your team on a case-by-case basis – some may have more obvious benefits than others. For instance, you might benefit from using an AI chatbot to deal with basic customer questions or problems but may not benefit from machine learning tools that can spot patterns in large sets of data (or vice versa).

Using AI to automate your processes

In this section, we’ll look at how you can use AI for workflow automation. You might already be using workflow automation in the form of scheduled emails or tasks. You may also be familiar with payroll automation, which involves automating the more tedious aspects of payroll processing, tax deductions and filings.

Advantages of using AI automation

One of the key benefits is that automating your workflows can reduce repetitive tasks, freeing up time that your teams can spend on more urgent and important tasks. Other benefits include reducing human error and improving team communication. 

Alongside using automation to schedule emails or tasks, you can also use it during the recruitment process to streamline your hiring strategy. You can use it to generate SEO-optimised job descriptions that attract the right candidates more easily. It can also potentially eliminate bias in screening, as AI screening tools focus on candidates based on skill rather than gender or ethnicity.

Disadvantages of using AI automation

However, it’s important to note that human bias can still affect the outcome of AI screening in some cases, as it may create job descriptions that specify certain requirements that may rule out or dissuade candidates from marginalised backgrounds or younger candidates.

Automating certain processes may also make the skill sets of some of your staff redundant. You might choose to look at upskilling or reskilling these staff so that they are better equipped to use AI and can adapt to new responsibilities that arise thanks to AI automation. Consider training staff in the skills required to monitor and evaluate the outcomes of your AI automated processes (such as monitoring for bias during candidate screenings).

Using AI for data analytics

Now, let’s look at how you can use AI to track employee performance and draw key insights from this. You can use AI to gain insight into real-time performance analytics and more effectively adjust your employee’s targets based on changes to their learning and performance. What’s more, you can also use AI to help manage projects as it can be used to spot patterns in large data sets over a given period of time.

Advantages of using AI data analytics

You can also use AI data analytics to improve the personalised feedback that you provide for employees based on their performance as it enables you to provide more continuous feedback rather than less frequent performance evaluations. In order to collect employee data and use it correctly, you might use data-point assessment and data triangulation.

Although this doesn’t mean that your managers should stop providing feedback completely, it can assist them in providing more regular and more accurate feedback about employees that – using the right tools – can help prevent unhelpful feedback based on personal bias.

AI for data analytics in general is useful because it can reduce human error as well as more quickly and efficiently process large sets of data. For businesses, this can be useful as it can provide you with key insights into how your customers use your services, different trends in employee performance and sales insights. 

Disadvantages of using AI data analytics

There are some potential disadvantages to look at. Some employees might see a constant monitoring of their performance as an invasion of privacy and this might have the adverse effect of lowering morale and increasing staff turnover. As using AI to measure performance is relatively new and untested, you may want to discuss the implications of using it with your staff or management.

If you plan to provide your staff with continuous performance metrics, it’s a good idea to show them what is to be gained from doing so and discuss with them employment rights surrounding privacy and use of their personal data. If you plan to use employee data to improve your understanding of performance, it’s also a good idea to familiarise yourself with the UK law surrounding data privacy.

Using AI for customer service

Finally, you can also use AI to help provide your customers with better customer service. You can create AI chatbots trained on your business’s preexisting data so that it can provide the right answers to your customers’ questions. To create a chatbot from scratch, it is likely that you will need to hire an employee with the right programming skills, such as a programmer or developer. 

AI chatbots can be used in the following ways to improve your customer services:

• responding to customer enquiries more quickly and efficiently
• reducing the number of repetitive questions that your online customer service assistants have to handle
• dealing with simple tasks and only transfer customers to human agents when they have more complex queries

Advantages of using AI chatbots for customer service

Human customer service is still an essential part of your communications strategy. Still, AI can be used during the troubleshooting process to remove more repetitive tasks, ensuring that your customer service team can focus on addressing more complicated customer issues. What’s more, your customer service team can also use AI themselves in order to help decide what answers to provide your customers.

Disadvantages of using AI chatbots for customer service

AI chatbots may be limited in what they can provide customers so, when it comes to more complex issues, you might want to have a human team in place that it can refer customers to in this situation. Another issue is that some customers may prefer talking with a person when resolving issues, which may affect the relationship and perception that they have of your business. According to a study, 86% of customers prefer to talk to a human over chatbots and would be less likely to interact with the business if this option was not available.

Make AI work for your organisation by using it strategically. However, this means training your staff in the right skills so that you can get the most out of the AI tools available. Complex AI features like machine learning require niche skill sets, which you may wish to hire for. When combined with a skilled team, AI can be used as a great complement, particularly when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and freeing up time.