Can AI Still Help Non-Tech Businesses or Is It Only for Tech Companies

published Sep 04, 2020
2 min read

Artificial intelligence, otherwise known simply as AI, is an incredibly useful tool for a vast array of purposes. It helps to power many facets of modern life from helping to tailor your news and social feeds for engaging content, to helping to diagnose and treat cancer.

AI in Business

What is AI?

There is no definitive AI system. AI systems aren’t a singular piece of software or even technology that can be implemented. Instead, AI is a term that encompasses a wide variety of systems, tools, and programs that all have one thing in common: they apply some form of intelligence to help complete a task. Generally speaking, AI systems have the ability to learn and adapt to the data they are processing, in addition to handling massive amounts of data in mere seconds, amounts that would take years for a human to work through. The amount of data, and the ability to analyse and process it with some degree of intelligence, allows AI systems to identify and process trends in data and information in ways humans struggle to do.

Using AI in Non-Tech Businesses

All this may sound highly technical and only suited to businesses at the leading edge of technological development and advancement. The reality is AI systems can benefit businesses of all shapes, sizes, and working in any sector. Here are a few ways that implementing AI can benefit your business.

Improve Internal Processes

AI systems are perfect for refining and optimising your businesses internal processes and systems. They won’t fully replace a human element in the business’s workflows, but they can streamline the workflows and processes to help your staff get on with moving your business forward rather than getting bogged down in time-consuming administration work.

Traditional non-tech orientated businesses, such as Crystal Bathrooms, have integrated AI into their internal process for a more streamlined sales and marketing funnel, allowing them to make better use of data-driven targeting on digital campaigns.

Data-Driven Decisions

The more data a business has to make its decisions the better those decisions will be. Data analysis, especially big data, is the wheel-house of AI-based systems. AI systems don’t do well with creative tasks; they won’t design your new company logo or branding—that still requires the human touch. But they excel at processing large amounts of data to find patterns and trends that would be impossible for a human purely due to the volume of information.

AI can be used to help provide data-driven insights into all aspects of your business operations. From the best targeting for advertising and marketing campaigns to identifying the elements that are costing your business money. Data-driven decisions aren’t guaranteed to help your business succeed, but they will certainly set you on the right path.

Avoid Human Mistakes

Human error is inevitable in any business. No matter how well-trained, thorough, and careful your staff are, human nature is to make errors. People have off days, make typos, misinterpret data. It’s not malice or incompetence, it’s simply a fact of human nature. AI systems don’t have off days, they can’t make typos, and they consistently interpret data in an intelligent and adaptable way.

For example, traditionally time-consuming tasks such as lawyers working in contract law, such as when dealing with property settlements, the process can be automated with a document scanning software, so the program can look out for hitches in the contract and AI can be used to continuously improve what it can pick up.

Human errors can cost your business thousands in both lost money and time. AI systems can not only help to minimise the occurrences of human error in monotonous, detail-orientated work, but they can also be utilised to scan for and detect human error before they can cause an issue.

On-going Learning

One of the truly great things about AI systems over traditional computer-based automation is their ability to learn, adapt, and change over time in response to the information and data they receive. The ability to learn and adapt to the data means that AI systems are constantly learning and advancing their algorithms to provide more informed, intelligent, and accurate information to your business.

It’s clear that artificial intelligence can offer some major advantages to any business. Implementing AI into your existing business workflow where appropriate can help you to streamline your business processes, avoid costly and time-consuming mistakes, and make more intelligent and informed business and marketing decisions.

Utilising AI is also easier than you may think, it doesn’t require complex and detailing computing knowledge, you don’t have to know how to program a system from the ground-up. Many services and solutions are available in an off-the-shelf manner ready to be deployed into your business today.