Experts predict the AI market will grow from $184 billion in 2024 to $826 billion by 2030. And considering the wide range of use cases for AI tools, that’s not much of a surprise. However, while solutions like ChatGPT continue growing in popularity among everyday users, the most significant potential of artificial intelligence lies in the business world.
AI automation in particular is an exciting way to harness the power of such tools. It allows businesses to reap multiple benefits.
First and foremost, intelligent automation (IA) helps enhance human productivity and efficiency while reducing costs. It can speed up (or even completely take over) repetitive processes to allow professionals to focus on high-value tasks. It can fill gaps in skills and labor, allowing businesses to do better work without expanding their teams.
Most importantly, it helps organizations mitigate risks by empowering them with high-quality data that would be difficult to collect by hand.
With this in mind, it’s evident that AI automation plays a crucial role in allowing businesses to thrive. But the only way these tools can actually work is if human users know how to utilize them. Here’s how to get started with AI automation in a way that will benefit your business.
Understand What AI Automation Can Do for Your Business
One of the first steps toward implementing intelligent automation in your organization’s workflow is understanding the potential use cases for IA tools.
The good news is that you can solve almost any business-related pain point with these solutions. But, employing anything that comes your way most likely won’t result in success. Instead, it will only overwhelm your employees and create IT silos, preventing your company from reaching its full potential. HBR’s research discovered that employees waste up to 9% of their total time at work switching between browser tabs and apps, adding up to about four hours per week.
One of the best ways to avoid this performance pitfall is, of course, to identify areas for your business to enhance with AI automation.
For instance, if you have a small marketing team, but are trying to break into a competitive market, using high-quality AI marketing tools could allow you to attract more prospects, engage your target audience, and boost growth.
Or, if you run an e-commerce business that also sells on Amazon, winning the Buy Box will be essential for ensuring product visibility. In that case, some AI tools could be efficient at helping you optimize your Amazon listings, seeing that they can get the job done in less than 15 minutes, as opposed to doing things manually.
Set Clear Goals for Implementing AI Automation
While you may want to boost your team’s productivity or elevate the customer experience with intelligent automation, it’s important to understand that this isn’t something that simply happens by investing in a solution.
Instead, successfully integrating AI automation tools in your business’ workflow requires that you have specific plans on what you want to do and how you want to do it. Do you want to save time? Money? Wish to help your team be more creative and productive without causing them to burn out?
Know what you want to achieve. Then, go about discovering potential solutions for your intended use case.
When deciding how to use these solutions to reach your goals, a good rule of thumb is to start with the following two activities:
- Study your existing workflow to discover easy opportunities for AI automation. For instance, these may include repetitive and time-consuming tasks. You may want to minimize risk in specific areas, for example when sending emergency text messages during critical events.
- Prioritize low-cost, high-impact IA solutions that will help your business make significant gains. Yes, utilizing an advanced solution for project management can be a great way to free up some time. But if your team doesn’t already utilize PM tools (and has no need for them), then introducing this type of AI software is only going to frustrate them and slow them down.
Remember That Employee Education Is Key
AI automation has tremendous potential. But only in the hands of a capable user.
The truth is that most AI tools generate average results with basic instructions. And, depending on when and how they were built, they may present your team with inaccurate (or impossible) results — think of the time when Google suggested adding glue to pizza to make it more delicious. Yum!
So, if you want intelligent automation to make a real difference to your business’ success potential, you (and your employees) need to learn how to create great prompts. If you utilize AI for content marketing automation, understand that for these posts to attract customers and positively affect your SERP rankings, you will have to fact-check and improve them to offer genuine value and reflect your brand’s identity.
Similarly, if you’re using AI for data processing, you will have to take your time to ensure the information you provide is accurate, consistent, and organized in a way that enables automation.
Explore the Potential Drawbacks of AI Automation
In general, the benefits of intelligent automation outweigh the disadvantages. Nonetheless, as you explore opportunities to incorporate AI into your team’s workflow, you must be prepared for the fact that it may not always work out in the way you intended it to.
You have to take into account (possibly poor) data quality, complexity, or your employees’ skills. In some cases, your prospects may not want to interact with AI due to preconceived prejudices or bad experiences from the past.
For example, AI automation offers exceptional opportunities for brands to boost the customer experience — especially with tools like chatbots, AI based answering systems, or personalization solutions.
But research from Gartner still found that 64% of consumers don’t want companies to rely exclusively on AI for customer service. So, if you plan on implementing this type of solution, it’s essential that you do so in a way that will genuinely benefit your prospects rather than just your bottom line.
Fortunately, this can be easily done if you:
- Allow consumers some control over how they interact with your brand
- Give them options to get in touch with human agents
- Create knowledge bases that aid self-service and allow customers to solve their pain points with AI assistance without creating unnecessary frustration
Conclusion
Even though it may seem daunting at first, AI automation can be an easy way for your business to grow.
Nonetheless, if you plan on implementing any of the IA solutions mentioned in this article, there are a few things you need to do to ensure success.
Firstly, be careful to choose solutions your brand really needs. Focus on implementing tools one by one (to guarantee proper integration). Continue educating yourself and your team to ensure the best possible results. And most importantly, always track results and consumer sentiment to ensure you’re benefiting from these aids.
