The question of machines taking work from humans is as old as technology. Should we get rid of ATMs to bring back the bank teller? Should we go back to having elevators operated by people? Businesses that are the fastest to adopt new technologies often win, and I am here to tell you that applies to Artificial Intelligence (AI) too — just not necessarily in the way most people thought.
A few years ago, the talk of the town was self-driving cars. What would happen with all the drivers when huge automotive and truck fleets were replaced by self-driving vehicles? That future isn't as distant as we thought, and AI already offers other vital applications in business. It's time entrepreneurs incorporate it.
Put AI into your marketing
Have a look at marketing and communications job boards. Most of the advertised jobs require great skill in content creation. But already, there are machine learning processors that can do the job. Half of the human input in creating content is superfluous.
Any entrepreneur knows the pain of investing time and resources into growing the marketing team but still wanting to focus on more foundational parts of building a killer product. Now tech is ready to reduce that pain.
AI is a tool that can help you do more with less. It can help create content and perform other tasks in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, making your business more agile and efficient. So if you are looking for ways to make your business more competitive, AI is a tool worth considering. It will allow you to move faster and generate more revenue.
The biggest benefit of AI for entrepreneurs is its ability to offer other efficiencies in creating content. AI can provide insights into consumer behavior, spot trends, and create customized marketing messages in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
It also offers the potential to make content generation more cost-effective, as data, rather than people, train machine learning models. This reduces the need for human resources and cuts operational costs. All of this adds up to an incredible ability to create scalable solutions, allowing small business owners to save money while creating.
More with less makes the whole difference
Margins in today's day and age are smaller than they've ever been across the board. Just ask a day trader on the financial market. It used to be that thinking fast, analyzing data quickly, or having the most competent people on the stock-exchange trading floor would give you an edge. Now trading firms are chasing the speed of light to create a slightly faster connection to the Wall Street servers. The amazing part of this is the emphasis on slightly because we are talking about nanoseconds.
It is not common for a business to have resources as immediately monetizable as time is for Wall Street, but many tech businesses do have untapped resources in data. By finding ways to use data more effectively than competitors, tech businesses can create an edge that is not easily replicable.
Coho AI, for example, leverages machine learning to help B2B SaaS companies utilize their existing customer behavior, product, and sales data to provide actionable insights for maximizing growth. Such tools weren't available for companies with more modest resources in the past.
The importance of AI for entrepreneurs is its potential to save time and money and make data analysis more efficient. The key is identifying the opportunities and using AI solutions to exploit them.
Today's tech behemoths, like Facebook and Google, became that by leveraging extraordinary brainpower to monetize their data. But by deploying AI, smaller businesses can, in a feasible way, begin to play catch up.
Writing this column was a piece of cake
To write this column, I used an AI engine called Lex. It functions like a writing assistant. When I finish my thought, I prompt the AI, and it starts writing in my stead. It's a surreal experience to lean into having a machine replace my work. But after all, if Roomba cleans my floor, why can't Lex write my texts? I approximate Lex wrote about half of this column, sparing me some of the hardest hours of the writing process.
It is a liberating and exciting experience to see the power of AI. It not only generates content but can also suggest the next steps and advise entrepreneurs. It's a potential game changer for businesses of all sizes, and anyone serious about adopting next-generation tech must get ahead on this.
Ariel ShapiraENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK® CONTRIBUTOR Founder
Ariel Shapira is a father, entrepreneur, writer and speaker.
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