Technological advancements have prompted businesses globally to embrace technology in order to stay relevant and keep up with the times. One such modern advancement is technologies like AI and ML.

However, gone are the days when such advanced technological solutions were only affordable by the MNC(s). Today, the landscape has shifted tremendously, leading to the accessibility of technologies like AI and ML becoming more mainstream. Even small businesses and start-ups are in a position to quickly adopt these tech solutions to reap advantages for their brand.

AI and ML are mechanisms that can, to a large extent, accurately imitate human-like actions, including chores like voice recognition, image identification, spam filtration, self-driving vehicles, medical diagnosis etc.

Although such advancements are ubiquitous now, many businesses still harbour a strong hesitance with their implementation. As a start-up founder, understanding the exceptional long-running benefits AI/ML can provide, here we list down five ways in which start-ups can integrate AI/ML into their business strategy to boost productivity:

1. Implementing AI to complete repetitive tasks to prevent exhaustion

It is common for many businesses and start-ups to hold a prejudice against the heavy implementation of AI or ML-based software in the workplace. This is because many believe that such technological advancements are working towards replacing humans in the workplace. However, if used properly, such tools can help in reducing the burden on workers effectively.

The main reason entrepreneurs should contemplate investing in AI-based models is that they help tremendously in making the jobs of their employees mode efficient and convenient. It is often that under hectic work climates, many employees end up working chores that are below their pay grade. This can quickly lower their morale and waste their potential over doing monotonous non-value add tasks.

Here, leveraging AI-based technologies can help streamline the business operations such as basic research, financial reporting, data collection, HR record keeping, and customer services, which can help improve productivity of the workforce; thereby enabling workers to focus on their core duties and creating a more efficient and productive working environment.

2. Use it to boost marketing and sales

It is widely known that small businesses and start-ups face plenty of struggles initially in building an online presence. While many big companies invest in a dedicated digital marketing team, this may not be possible for young firms. Here also, investing in AI or ML can help. Software solutions which automate and improve sales and marketing techniques are available in abundance. Additionally, these also provide concepts such as sentiment analysis, text classification, recommendation algorithms, and predictive analytics to help decode how a start-up can best communicate and connect with its prospects and customers.

Content creation and its publication in relevant platforms are essential to building digital brand presence. However, this can be quite a lengthy process and may take even years for companies to create enough attention-grabbing content to appeal to their audience. Instead, opting for AI assistant tools can shorten the process considerably. Their services like email marketing, ad campaigns, social media management, assisted writing, and content personalisation can extensively help in the marketing management of start-ups.

Furthermore, their intelligent recommendation engines help effectively market brand offers to the relevant audience and generate leads. Recommendation systems majorly include machine learning to observe the target viewers’ behaviour and use those to suggest results to increase the probability of lead generation.

3. Recruit top talent and manage it effectively

People play the most important role in the success of any organization, regardless of its size or area of operation. Hence, hiring the right employees for the team is highly crucial. This is not an easy job as recruiters generally have to spend hours scouring the right candidate by reading all the resumes, approaching them with offers, conducting interviews and shortlisting only a few candidates that are best suited. This exact procedure tends to be just as hectic for the candidates as well, as often they receive no feedback on their application, or they are asked to interview only to realise the job description is not a good fit for them. All this can take weeks or even months at times.

Luckily today, to ease this process for recruiters, AI software solutions exist, which conduct the entire process in less time, reduce biases, create a more accurate profile while adhering to both recruiter and candidate requirements. One such example is AI-powered job portals that collect data from the employers’ and applicants’ profiles, carefully analyse them and send suitable recommendations to both parties.

4. Connect better with customers

A crucial aspect of growth is returning to old customers, in addition to focusing on new customers. This is called customer retention, a highly underestimated technique for business growth. Unfortunately, many young entrepreneurs end up neglecting their duties towards old clients and ultimately cause harm to their own company. As a business owner who aspires to expand their services over time, one must understand how important it is that their customers remain satisfied throughout their collaboration period to create reliability and trust. Moreover, customer retention is manifold cheaper than trying to acquire new customers.

For this, customer support services such as automation can be beneficial as the inclusion of ML and AI can help create behaviour reports and analyse them accordingly; furthermore, the addition of chatbots on websites can mandate a personalised chatting service for their customers without having to hire a workforce that is available for 24/7 to solve their regular queries. This is a cost-effective solution and helps businesses stay in touch with their clients and solve most of their queries instantaneously.

5. Compete with larger organisations cost-effectively

It is often seen that many large companies use the latest technologies with modern tools like artificial intelligence for conducting their businesses. And this helps them extensively to improve efficiency and productivity.

Nowadays, even smaller businesses have access to these technology solutions and wit the advent of Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, using such solutions is within their budget as well. Although we are still only scratching the surface with respect to the potential of technologies such as AI and ML, plenty of software and services exist that can deliver massive value to business owners.

Conclusion

It is now understood how incorporating AI or ML-based technologies in even a small scale start-up operation can give significant advantages by improving efficiency and productivity. And that is primarily because it can contribute to most business functions and ultimately, lead to faster growth.

The earlier one adopts them, the better edge they can get over their competitors. Many small businesses have already started their digitization process and are warmly embracing modern technologies, once they have seen its power. Given the supersonic speed with which people are becoming accustomed to such modern technologies, these services and their impact on businesses will only expand in the future.

(The given article is attributed to Chayan Mukhopadhyay, Co-Founder and CEO of Qandle)