Small Businesses and e-commerce stores are financing artificial intelligence (AI) software and services to keep up with the growing-developing technology.
Professionals say that artificial intelligence can pay off as an investment. In fact, AI is supporting small businesses with their daily routine operations.
Christina Shim, IBM’s head of sustainability software, said in an interview with a news site that “Artificial Intelligence can help contribute data from across worksheets, PDFs, and business units, solving insights that can improve operations and growth toward business goals,”.
“Mostly, businesses already have the data they want, but it remains suppressed across different databases, worksheets, systems, business parts, and even third parties. The challenge is joining that data in a precise manner, which is where AI derives in. The tools to combine data already exist, but AI has the potential to boost how useful they are and enhance business operations to an unparalleled level.”
Resource Use
In an interview, business consultant Ayanna Carrington clarified that using Artificial Intelligence streamlines many back-end processes, which would otherwise take double the time for one person to achieve.
Further, Christina said, “Investing in AI permits you to free up resources and budget to emphasize talent and time in other places,” “Now, as a small business owner, you can focus on the big-ticket items such as meeting with stakeholders, spending more time with consumers, and building up your real dream team.”
Artificial intelligence is part of Carrington’s day-to-day life as a small business owner. One of the first AI tools that she used was Calendly, which can help calendar meetings.
“We have tools like Otter and Meetgeek that can join meetings with us and take high-level notes that we can refer back to; now, there isn’t essentially a need to have an extra person there just to do that specific job, and you can change your person/human support on another task,” she added.
“Grammarly is another great tool for those of us who are still connected with writing jobs and tasks, and we see extra development that helps us in parts such as business development, marketing and strategy.”
Ilya Smirnov, head of the AI department at the software firm Usetech, said in an interview that artificial intelligence plays a big part in the marketing sector. Usually, AI, mostly machine learning, is leveraged for tasks such as sales prediction, planning promotional plans, understanding customer preferences, and creating overall attractive customer experiences.
“For example, a company making children’s toys brands customer cards with pictures generated using LLMs (large language models),” he added. “Similarly, e-commerce stores are adding and starting to use chatbots in their applications, exclusively for the first line of support, which decreases the load on the person in support by 60 to 70 percent.”
New AI Tools
There has been a recent surge in new AI tools designed for small businesses. Salesforce has launched Einstein Copilot, an AI assistant that aims to improve customer experiences by automating tasks, examining data, and increasing cumulative productivity.
Einstein is defined as deeply connected to a company’s data and metadata, allowing it to comprehend the business and its customers well. This allows it to grip complex conversations, FAQs, answer questions correctly, and produce new content.
The world’s top-class domain-hosting company has announced its AI tool. GoDaddy’s new AI tool, GoDaddy Airo, is intended to help small businesses build websites. It offers support with domain selection, logo creation, website content drafting, and setting up payment systems.
Airo AI Tool saves time and arranges for customization options to match each brand’s uniqueness. It also manages business email setup, social media incorporation and product descriptions, making it a valuable time-saver for customers.
When selecting AI software, small businesses should imagine technology providers seeing AI as a means for making better, more actual solutions rather than as the end product itself, Aaron Harris, the CTO of Sage, an AI accounting solutions provider for SMBs, etc. Businesses should not feel stressed about hiring developers, AI engineers, or data experts just to use Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Further, he said “On the other hand, small businesses should understand the menaces,”. “AI is unsatisfactory, and AI may announce compliance, data privacy and security risks if not correctly implemented.
“When assessing AI solutions, small businesses should reflect factors like security, support and integration with current systems, and they should understand the rules and values that guide the AI provider’s development practices.”
