We are living through the historical evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, a revolution. It’s crucial for businesses to try every means to stay ahead of the curve. After all, it’s the age of competition. All the technology leaders are making the most of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and intelligent automation.

Therefore, it is imperative that executives learn the best practices employing AI in their business. Only then will there be fair play. Just like sci-fi films, our lives are entirely dependent on the Siri's and Alexas of the world. It’s true, and you know. No one sets up their alarms by themselves, anymore. We use an AI assistant to do it.

Ever thought about the amount of data generated by both humans and machines combined? And it is something that cannot be processed efficiently by a man. Thus, the advent of devices that can absorb, interpret and make complex yet smart decisions similar to humans. This is where artificial intelligence is the hands down winner. AI is trending to be the future of critical decision-making.

The important part to note is that AI is contributing significantly to our livelihood. Mainly through three key ways: augmenting decision-making, automating basic everyday processes, and providing greater sensor-fed awareness of the world around us. 

So let’s talk about it. Does your company employ AI as an opportunity or as a competitive advantage? If you nodded ‘yes’ to that, this guide is officially for your use. This guide will share why AI is essential for businesses, examples of AI for enterprises, use cases, and how Intersog is the best partner for your AI and software development. 

Why does AI matter for businesses?

We are living through a pandemic. Indeed, nothing in the world should surprise us any more. That being said, the technological advancements in the world are continually trying to leave us in awe.

With their drones and robots, there is no catching a break. It all started with steam engines and water power, then electricity, computing, and now artificial intelligence. If you leave it to Elon Musk, cars will fly soon. 

AI, as a concept, has been around for a while. But it has recently become much more advanced and transformative. This is simply because we have more data than ever.

Every task — whether offline or online, creates data. This has led to a better and smoother machine learning process, with more data — the machines are able to learn faster. Check your Instagram explore or Spotify feed. It’s tons of choices — all because of data. AI is on a boom because of cloud and distributed computing — we have more space to store, process, and analyze the data. 

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There is no business that cannot make the most of AI. Take Agriculture, for instance. AI can help farmers predict and understand weather and soil conditions. This will simply let them plan better, have a better sense of what farming equipment to use. That’s not it. Actually, Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to reduce manual work and makes it easier to pick ripe fruits with machines’ help, so the entire crop doesn’t go waste. Today's AI solutions have been developed in such a way that they can reason, learn, perceive, and interact with the environment, just like a human would.

Machine Learning and NLP can automate the monotonous and time-consuming manual work, and the humans can focus on much more critical tasks that utilize their minds to the best capacity. AI has proven to drive business outcomes, provide more efficient insights, and help business owners in decision-making. 

AI has major benefits

The benefits of AI for the business depend on the industry they are in, the budget they put in, the size of the company, and many other factors. That being said, there is no one industry that won’t benefit from AI. Here’s how:

• AI allows automation of mundane tasks, which means the company executives can put their minds to better use — and utilize their energy for more strategic projects.
  
• It provides increased competitive advantage and improves the efficiency of the work put in by the business owners. This leads to multiplied productivity and gains. 

• Advanced automated interactions with the customers, clients, and other business channels. This leads to a better resolution of customer queries and, in return, increases the probability of customer loyalty for the business. 

• Smart and more efficient interpretation of data, better management of the information, and risk management. There can be very little room for security breaches because a machine will always follow the workflow’s predefined steps.
  
• AI can identify and monitor risks automatically. And ensure the safety of the company’s online assets and customer data.
  
• With the visual AI in place, the analysis of video and audio content is seamless and real-time.

Four types of AI for business

Machine learning is transforming the businesses left, right, and centre. Of course, machine learning is mostly used in data processing — but there is more. Before we talk about that, let’s mention the four types of artificial intelligence that exist in nature: reactive machines (machine learning), limited memory, mind theory, and self-awareness. 

For businesses to better understand what AI they can put to better and practical use, we have classified AI types below. This will provide you with an idea of what AI your business needs or can put to use. 

Conversational AI

Conversational AI bridges the gap between human and machine language. Of course, it’s not just one thing — conversational AI is a mix of technologies that recognize the human language, decipher it, and then determine a machine’s response while mimicking a social conversation. This dialogue sharing is made possible with the use of AI algorithms and NLP (natural language processing).

If you are using conversational AI for your business, this is the ideal scenario — the AI will use NLP to respond to a customer’s query (reactive engagement), and at the same time, anticipate the next question the customer is about to ask (proactive engagement). This is a powerful strategy for customer retention and problem-solving. 

Common examples of conversational AI are:

• Chatbots: almost every company in today’s time has employed a chatbot in their customer support process. This is obviously the need of the hour since your customer is much more aware and impatient now. The need for a robust customer support strategy is now. 

• Voice assistants: Like chatbots, your customer can communicate with the voice assistant by speaking with it. This is not necessarily transnational but can perform tasks like making phone calls or playing music.
  
• Mobile assistants: Google now, Siris, and Alexas of the world are taking over, and there is no denying that. Your customers can use mobile assistants to do the tasks they need to get done quickly, like sending a quick message to mom or asking for a weather forecast.

Analytic AI

Analytic AI can help in the transformation of a business and its practices. This aspect of AI helps to centralize and create deep associates, such as in a neural network AI system, with vast volumes of data from multiple sources and breaks them into manageable and meaningful pieces of information for the executive level to leverage for business insights for mission critical operational decisions. It is essential for a business owner to manage data most efficiently and securely, keeping in mind several things like customer security.

As a business owner, you’d agree that it is extremely important to carefully analyze the sizable data. This AI approach helps in predicting future outcomes on the basis of historical data. It is responsible for generating a real-time analysis of the said data, ultimately aiding business managers in making critical business decisions. 

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It helps businesses with deep learning and data scanning for dependencies and patterns. This leads to a better understanding of customer behavior and business proposition. Once you know how your business has been performing and what your customers expect your business to be, it is easier to make it happen. Some examples of analytic AI are supplier risk assessment, sentiment analysis, and social media listening. You receive data-driven insights and can make an informed decision about your business. 

Visual AI

The “gym clothes” ads you keep repeatedly seeing after searching for the same clothes is a classic example of visual AI. The intelligent image processing software programs photo recognition that records consumer’s behavior and understands the habits. 

An image analysis software can surface an image as a search result because it is able to see the elements in a photo, just like a human eye. Through image recognition, a machine possessing visual AI works as an image finder and sources the image for a user. 

The image processing technologies basically extract data through the statistical classification of visual imagery to gain useful information/data from it. 

Here are some ways visual AI works: 

• Face recognition: identifying a person’s face from a database with the help of a photo clicked from a 3D camera.
• Portrait segmentation: recognize the contour of every person in a frame.
• Depth estimation: estimating depth maps from 2d images or approximating the distance between objects from a camera viewpoint.
• White discrimination: recognizing the exposure and white objects in a photo. This is usually very helpful to people in the visual arts business when an image’s quality is essential. Visual AI helps in improving HDR image generation.

Actionable AI

Actionable intelligence allows machines to combine data in a philosophical context and perform tasks. The process of collecting relevant data for business and then taking action based on that data is mainly the work of actionable AI. It helps companies discover, analyze, and manage both structured and unstructured data in real-time and cloud-based locations.

Be it robots, drones, self-drive cars, or a refrigerator that senses when it needs maintenance — actionable AI streamlines control, understanding, and access by facilitating information collection for actionable purposes. 

We like the world we live in — the Internet of Things, as we call it. Actionable AI can help your business in improving user experiences and making improvements in the future. For example, a self-driving car can qualify as a fully autonomous vehicle with actionable AI as it is expected to action basis all the data collected through cameras, sensors, and radar. These provide a sense of direction to the machine, and hence, it delivers.

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Actionable AI can help companies collect data that can improve the quality of their products, services, and user experience. Actionable AI is a factor in building customer relationships nowadays. Business owners can streamline control and understand certain products that will allow information to be collected for actionable purposes. 

It is safe to confess that actionable intelligence is a mix of analysis and decision-making processes that turn raw data into significant information.

Use Cases

Now that we have established the importance and use of AI for businesses, we only list a few use cases here for better understanding.

Chatbots for sales and customer service

Chatbot, by far, is the most critical tool to be used for customer service. Almost every company has employed one. It avoids human effort and resolves basic customer queries seamlessly. Not just this, chatbots offer easy integration with humans — making sure that the customer gets his/her answer. They can also be integrated with CRM platforms to personalize interactions.

Chatbots simply streamline the interaction between humans and machines with the use of AI. They also offer new and improved ways to customer service through better engagement with more efficiency.

That’s not it. Chatbots can also perform follow-up functions. Automated tasks like this enhance the user experience, and that’s what every company desires in today’s time.

Let’s talk about some chatbots that companies employ for sales and customer service:

HubSpot: A free chatbot development tool that offers live chat to the users. This tool also provides self-service articles, information, and can be integrated with a ticketing system in HubSpot CRM. Not only this, but the tool also offers support for sales and marketing.

Chatfuel: Chatfuel is a top-rated tool amongst business owners. It can be installed for free on your company’s Facebook page. It has a very straightforward bot-building process with a step-by-step guide to help you through. This bot is immediately activated as soon as it’s installed. 

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Bold360: this chatbot is probably every business owner’s dream because it does not just offer pre-written scripts. This bot uses natural language processing to personalize conversations with customers. This bot works frequently and learns and improves from the conversations that it has with the clients. 

Automated insights and decision-making

It is essential to automate the decision-making process if you’re going to be relying on machines. Don’t you think? It happens through the means of Natural Language Generation (NLG) — the majority of the fundamental decisions are automated. Thereby saving time, energy, and efforts. 

Let’s look at a few examples: 

ElementAI: This company is working around the clock to transform the way machines and humans collaborate and interact. Their aim is to make advancements achievable and breakthroughs believable. At ElementAI, they design AI that is deployed to serve the public. It means their research and design offers complete safety and transparency. They research the market thoroughly and create products for your enterprise that can provide you with automated insights and ideas. This AI is responsible for taking vast amounts of data and turning it into chunks of useful business owners’ information. 

ThinkSpot: It’s just facts, and they want to provide them to you through AI. ThinkSpot aims at creating a more fact-driven environment, with technology that is easy to use. The company seeks to create AI that makes analytics so easy that you fall in love with it. The idea is to create personalized insights for business owners. Whether it is a store manager or a hospital clinician, everyone should be able to access the information — before they ask for it. ThinkSpot is helping company employees to seek answers without any training. 

Drones to disinfect indoor and outdoor facilities (about COVID-19)

These are such unprecedented times. Any measure to prevent the illness is like the best measure. And why shouldn’t it be?

COVID-19 has changed the face of everything. And not for good. So the company owners of specific brands stepped up and decided to create drones to disinfect indoor and outdoor facilities to prevent coronavirus spread. That is, genius. Isn’t it? 

Let’s see an example:

Digital Aerolus: This company has developed an indoor drone with C-band UVC lights to battle the spread of the COVID-19 virus with a successful disinfection rate of 99%. By making the most patented technologies, this drone can fly inside the infected areas and sterilize them. This drone flies above the surface and illuminates using 36 optically intense 265 NM LED UVC lights.

Nowadays, the indoor and outdoor areas need to be cleaned multiple times during the day; it will be nearly impossible for a man to do it. That’s why we need these drones more than ever. In fact, they are obviously faster than humans — there’s no denying that. These drones are not just efficient but also safe. They do not compromise on the safety of the person who has to clean a personal space. These machines seem to be the future, clearly.

Personalized AR shopping

Augmented reality can be most definitely used to improve user experience, especially when numerous the population is online shopping more than ever. 

For the retailers, now is a great time to make sure they create a digital shopping experience for the users, and they make it seamless. Through the means of augmented reality in shopping, customers can share content with virtual products. The user-generated content is outstanding marketing for brand owners — it makes them more relatable.

Let’s see how some brands are making the most of AR: 

• Home Depot: Home Depot’s mobile app allows the users to overlay its merchandise in any room in their home. It makes it possible to have a 3D visual of a product and how it would look in their space. 

• IKEA Place: IKEA’s AR app has been changing lives, and the way furniture is bought. The furniture giant has an app called IKEA Place that lets you measure the space and provides recommendations on the table that fits the area. This app was one of the first apps to be using Apple’s AP technology.

• Sephora: Sephora’s app consists of a virtual artist that uses facial recognition technology, allowing customers to try products digitally. They can scan their face and try on products to see how they look. 

AI development with Intersog

Now that we have discussed the types of AI that can truly help a business reach newer heights and generate more revenue, how do you think you should proceed toward it? Simple, you refer to Intersog. The list of AI approaches and technology mentioned in this guide above are courtesy of Intersog. In fact, we specialize in developing custom solutions.

Intersog drives to help our clients solve their most challenging technology initiatives with the latest and most efficient methods available. Hence our focus on AI development over the next several years. Intersog assists the Fortune 500 with exceptional talent and bringing new products to market with some extremely brilliant and creative entrepreneurs. We help them integrate AI-driven software systems, capitalize on tech trends, boost their domain value building a robust long term hold digital future. We have worked in many industries such as Automotive, Healthcare, eCommerce, Fintech, Manufacturing, Warehousing, Transportation, and much more. 

If you are looking for ideation, maintenance, or just upgrading, we can be your partners. At Intersog, we boast a strong team of brilliant minds who are creating AIs and technology for easy integration in your businesses. We also provide software development and tech hiring services. Our software developers and engineers mainly work in Python, JavaScript, C++, Rust, Java, and R programming languages.

Intersog delivers award-winning software engineering talent and IT consulting solutions. We aim to deliver high-performing solutions to businesses to ensure high efficiency and a successful future. We can help you achieve outstanding business results and gain a competitive edge in the digital world through the means of models and frameworks like Rasa, TensorFlow, GPT-2, Stanford CoreNLP, and Baidu ERNIE.

Intersog has been around for over 14 years in business, and we have an excellent team of over 250 plus technology super minds who have made over 150 clients happy with cutting-edge digital solutions.