The digital economy we live and work in now is changing the way we do business. Companies have more efficient and powerful technology at their disposal than ever before thanks to digital transformation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the technologies that is pushing massive changes across organizations and industries. Entrepreneurs with businesses adapting to this new normal are pulling ahead of their competitors faster, accelerating growth, and working with their partners more effectively and efficiently.

To get the most out of your company’s digital transformation, it’s time to put together a plan for integrating AI into processes and ideas across your organization. If you aren’t already, you may be falling behind.

Search Marketing

Search marketing is one of the fastest-growing areas in the digital business space because businesses need to reach their customers faster and farther than ever before. The days of selling to your clients over the phone are mostly over, and foot traffic and physical retail are shrinking every single year. If you are a direct-to-consumer business, using AI-enabled search marketing strategies will help protect against the potential downsides of this change.

Local

Any business reliant on a strong local population for its growth needs to have a search marketing strategy powered by AI. By optimizing for location-specific audiences, AI-enabled search marketing puts your ads in front of the right customers instead of the largest population without the right targeting.

David vs. Goliath

AI helps you maximize your advertising budget, meaning you can compete with the Goliaths of your industry. No matter what you budget, AI optimizes your campaigns to lower your cost per click and increase your conversion rate.

Voice Search

Consumers are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence voice assistants for search and other information. Businesses can use artificial intelligence search marketing to put their services on the radar of consumers using Alexa and Google Home regularly. Your business should consider adapting campaigns for voice search marketing as the market continues to grow.

Social Ads

Social media advertising gives you the ability to micro-target your audiences. If used correctly, it can be extremely effective when combined with AI.

Updates

AI updates ads to drive more engagement with them, increase visits to your website, and increase touchpoints with your intended audience. AI is always adapting your campaigns so that you don’t have to.

Automated Engagement

Once your customers click your ad, AI is also able to chat with them via chatbots. Your customers don’t need to wait to get a reply, and when the chatbot is out of its depth, it can hand the conversation over to a customer service representative for more in-depth help.

Customer Data Management

Your company’s digital transformation will require collecting and organizing a lot of data. Sorting and using that data can be time-consuming and difficult, but AI solves both problems for you.

The Data

Your company is collecting data about how customers pay, what channels they buy through, what they buy, how often they make a purchase, what they look at before and after they buy, and more. Collecting this data and sorting it is the responsibility of AI-powered systems that do the job for you while you take advantage of the insights of that data.

Tracking and Using the Data

AI can track all the data and come up with useful insights and conclusions for you. CRM AI systems can identify high-value customers and target them and identify new prospects that may be displaying similar traits. Instead of having your marketing and sales teams pore over the data manually, an AI system can do it all and free up their time for the creative aspects of their jobs.

Work Faster

Voice assistants allow your company to scan email, set up calendar events, and create conferencing data for all the participants while simultaneously sending out the invitations. Saving time using AI-powered voice assistants will make your workflows faster and save a lot of time.

You may be able to cut down on your workforce as you and your employees become more efficient every day. Project management assistants automatically pass on projects when they’re ready for the next step and alert you if something is not going according to plan. All of these features make your workflows more efficient and less prone to errors.

Site Analysis

This is not website analysis. Satellites and aerial imaging are more advanced and affordable than ever. Whether you’re a hedge fund trying to find out shipping information relevant to your investments or a producer looking to maximize the way you use your equipment and manpower, this bird’s eye advantage can help you.

Investing

Investing in the right companies is important, and knowing about their business inside and out is part of the job. Whether it is your supplier or a company you have invested in, renting an AI service to check their warehouses or factories for trucking and shipments gives you an idea of their sales and how much product they are moving.

Your AI-powered eye in the sky will analyze and track the movements of physical installations on the ground to give you insights that can’t be gleaned from a quarterly report.

Your Process

Whether it’s farming or construction sites, AI can review the way you use your equipment and manpower. Taking an overview of the work and the site, you can get a better idea of where everyone is and what they are doing. If there is a better way to do things, the AI can suggest changes and highlight problem areas of inefficiency and waste.

Product and Quality Control

AI-enabled healthcare systems designed to automatically sift through vast amounts of data to locate problems like cancer or heart disease are becoming more common and affordable. On a less scientific note, your business can also use this technology in your quality control process to automate and increase the accuracy of the process.

Healthcare

Diagnosis and detection have never been easier, because instead of needing a doctor with decades of experience, an AI can be trained on massive data sets to detect and diagnose health problems. Instead of waiting months, AI knows faster and with a higher level of accuracy what is really happening with a patient and what the problem might be if there is one.

Quality Control

When assessing your production methods and their outcomes, AI can play an important role. Using AI to spot repeated mistakes and narrow down the sources of those issues can make your production more efficient in every way. Instead of manually supervising every step of the process, AI can identify and fix problem areas immediately and with low margins of error.

Cloud Databases

Storing massive amounts of data, cloud databases are the new norm in the era of digital transformation. The main issue with having so much data is that it can be difficult to parse and analyze. AI solves this problem for your company.

Artificial intelligence helps you mine that data for the insights and gems that might be hidden in such large datasets. AI can process billions of data points quickly and find the relevant information that can help your business. It also learns and adapts to the data, giving you more accurate reports over time. AI is never static.

Increasing ROI for AI Systems

According to the 2016 Technology Vision Survey conducted by Accenture, 70% of corporations admitted to making a significantly higher investment in AI technologies. This cost is offset very quickly by the ROI in efficiency and cost reductions across your company.

With the added benefit of improvements and lower-cost technology over time, investing in AI costs less and returns more to your company than ever before. Implementing this digital transformation for your business is good for every area of your operations.

See Farther

AI systems pull insights from the data you feed it about your company, whether that’s accounting information, CRM software, or supply-chain management software. This enables you to make smarter decisions about your company and the directions you might want to take in the future.

If you need to choose which customers to focus on and decide between the best possible offers between suppliers and manufacturers, AI is poised to make your decisions easier and more effective.

AI is also able to identify leads and opportunities by parsing massive datasets that would otherwise be impossible to interpret.

Predict the Future

No, you won’t be able to get a crystal-clear premonition about the future of your company, but AI can capture the signals often missed by sales executives that hint at where things might be going. The future is often murky, but AI systems can help businesses predict customers’ views based on recent interactions and then use the information to improve the CRM.

Instead of being reactive and trying to hold onto customers as they are walking out the door, your company can be proactive by anticipating outcomes and focusing on the right metrics for improvement. This is a particular help for small businesses that may be dealing directly with their customers and may be managing personal relationships for their customers.

AI Is a Bazooka

The tools you use for your company right now may be working so far, but the obsolescence you will discover as you continue to compete with companies harnessing the power of AI will make it clear that a switch is needed. AI is the bazooka your company will swap for the pistol you’re using now, putting a powerful business weapon in the hands of every one of your employees.

Digital transformation is here to stay, and AI is the key to improving your business from top to bottom and taking advantage of the rapid growth that will come with it.