Gradually becoming an integral part of any industry we can think of, AI is changing the way we live our lives and the way we do business. It’s proven itself to be an effective and valuable way of handling routine tasks in an accurate way, for the optimal time, augmenting human skills and reducing the chances for human errors.

For years now, AI has been displaying the capability to push businesses to the next level, and help them become smarter, more efficient and more profitable. 

Despite this fact, only 25% of businesses are leveraging AI  to enhance their business processes, mostly in industries such as healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, technology, and electronics.

In 2020 its use will spread to other industries too, and disrupt different business processes. 

Here are some of its benefits we will hopefully be seeing more of.

1) Better User Experience

Businesses using AI-powered tools and switching to automated processes will be able to deliver a much better and highly personalized user experience to their customers.

Thanks to AI and machine learning, companies can now successfully handle large amounts of data coming from all relevant sources and have a better insight into the needs, desires, and interests of their customers. 

They can also learn more about their customers’ behaviors and deliver content and offers that are tailored to suit their particular needs and their position in the sales funnel. 

2) 24/7 Customer Support

With the use of conversational bots, AI is already changing the customer service and bringing it closer to the customers’ demands.

Customers highly value their time and choose to do business with companies that respect it. They don’t like to be put on hold when they need to make a complaint or wait for more than a few minutes to get answers to their questions.

With the help of customer service bots, companies can now create bot experiences for a wide range of service interactions. Bots can be used for scheduling appointments, tracking orders and deliveries, refunds and contract renewals, as well as for handling some of the complaints and resolving them.

Apart from saving time of customer service reps and enabling them to focus on high-value tasks that matter, chatbots' greatest benefit is their 24/7 availability. This means that the customers can be sure their needs will be met no matter what time of the day or night it is.

3) Predict Customer Behavior

AI can use data coming from many different sources to make accurate predictions about future circumstances and customers' behaviors. These predictions can be used to answer the customers' needs more efficiently, while at the same time, gaining more profit for your business.

For example, AI can keep track of a customer that visited an online shop a couple of times, viewing the same product but leaving before purchasing it, and decide to offer them a discount for the purchase, within your preset price values, bringing gain to both sides.

The benefits of AI predictions can be seen on a global scale too. An example of this is Amazons’ anticipatory shipping,  the system which delivers the products to the latest shipment hub before the order has even been made.

4) Easily Accessible Data Insights

Just how important insight in your business and customer data is, can be seen in the fact that UPS was able to save 10 million gallons of fuel annually, by using AI and big data to plan and optimize their routes. 

In 2020, even the businesses that don’t have a full-time data scientist in-house will be able to benefit from the thorough data insights that will become easily accessible. For starters, the Google Analytics Intelligence feature can offer businesses a lot of useful information, that they can use in their digital marketing strategies, thus significantly influencing their bottom line.

5) Better Online Security

Businesses can use AI to detect and avoid frauds and provide better online security for their business’ and customers’ data. 

Facial recognition is already in use in some industries, such as insurance, banking or retail, to identify customers and prevent fraud. This trend is most likely to spread into other industries as well, such as transportation, hospitality, logistics, healthcare, etc.

AI is not limited to recognizing faces and speech. It also uses other biometrics, such as the iris, retina, and finger too, effectively authenticating the person and granting them access.

6) Empower Decision-Making

AI’s capability to analyze large amounts of data, learn from them,  identify different patterns from both structured and unstructured data, and making predictions, can help businesses make well-informed decisions and minimize the risks of negative outcomes.

This approach will help businesses to adequately prepare for demand and market changes, growing competition or supply shortages, allowing them to stay afloat and remain competitive.

7) Help With Recruitment

Businesses of all sizes will have fewer difficulties when searching for the right hires.  AI-powered tools can be deployed to screen and research potential candidates much faster and with greater accuracy than their human counterparts.

Even though the job interview should still be left to humans, HR departments wouldn’t have to bother and waste their precious time filtering all the applications. They can focus on the more relevant things instead. 

Just how important automating these processes is can be seen in the fact that 52% of talent acquisition leaders claim that the hardest part of their job is identifying the right candidates from a very large applicant pool. Bering in mind that more than 75% of resumes received for the position come from unqualified for the job, professionals’ time spent on reviewing these applications is simply wasted.

AI will also bring benefits by matching accurately requirements of the job with candidates’ skills, experience, and knowledge, leading to much higher job satisfaction and decreased odds for turnover.

As you can see, AI will bring many serious changes to businesses in the years to come.  With the rise of some other advanced technologies, such as 5G and machine learning, its application benefits will grow too.

As doing business without AI will soon be impossible to imagine, consider implementing it in your business processes too, and enjoy the positive effects it has on your customers and your bottom line.