AI Technology and How it Makes Our Lives More Convenient

 

RODUCT	TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE  PRODUCT	WHAT THE PRODUCT CAN DO
Amazon’s Alexa	Natural Language Processing	Understand voice commands and relay information back in complete comprehensible sentences
StitchFix	Machine Learning	Analyze the fashion choices of people with similar taste and assemble personalized clothing boxes that will appeal to you
Tesla	Machine Learning, Situational Awareness	Autonomous car that is aware of its surroundings and can predict and/or prevent accidents
Facebook	Neural Networks	Use machine image systems to detect objects and classify images
Netflix	Machine Learning	Personalize the cover image on movies & TV Shows to cater to a users preferred type of content

How SMBs Should Use AI

Unless you’re a small business or startup building AI technology, it is unlikely that you will hire someone to “do AI.” What is far more likely is that you will start to notice AI capabilities show up in the software you are purchasing and already using. The landscape of existing AI technology for businesses is already remarkable:

Source: Shivon Zilis

 

It’s not realistic for any business to invest in all of these AI tools at once -- stay practical and assess your top business needs, the greatest potential impact a tool may have, and then, most importantly, try it. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind as you evaluate AI’s potential for your business: 

The Do’s and Don’ts of Implementing AI

DO	DON'T
Look to where your business already has large data sets like your CRM or ecommerce orders database. AI is only as good as the data you feed it. A small data set will only ever deliver sub-par results.	Make business intelligence your starting point. The future-promise is that AI will automatically surface business insights, problem areas, and opportunities. But the technology isn’t well-developed enough yet to be effective for SMBs.
Seek out opportunities to automate existing processes such as using chatbots to answer FAQS or scheduling assistants to manage your calendar. The narrow AI that exists to do these tasks is quite good, and can make you and your employees markedly more efficient.	Buy AI-powered tools just so you can have AI. Everyone is talking about AI right now and it create a lot of FOMO. Evaluate AI capabilities the same way you evaluate every software purchase: Do we have the time/resources/data to get value out of this tool?, Is the vendor overselling capabilities? Are there case studies from businesses like mine that show how this works in action? Is there a freemium version I can try before going all in?
Choose AI tools that are built on publicly available data that can be used to make your own business better today. For example, Text.io uses AI to parse public job postings and provide recommendations to help you improve your own recruiting efforts, HubSpot uses machine learning to understand the themes that search engines associate your content with and provide optimization recommendations.	Don’t fall prey to the idea that AI is some kind of magic bullet or cure-all. AI in its current form can have a positive impact on your business, but the hype is real. Be wary of any vendor promising AI that sounds too good to be true (it probably is).
Perfect your data collection processes. AI runs on data. If you’re not ready to implement AI today, now is still the right time to build internal capabilities to collect and store data: set up Google Analytics, track your sales deals in a CRM, invest in a marketing platform, start tracking customer support requests. Process, automation, and data collection today will set you up to create personalized, convenient customer experiences tomorrow.