How Businesses Can Utilize AI In 2023

In 2023, artificial intelligence is not only beneficial but necessary for businesses to adopt.

It can help make different things a lot easier and better for them, such as everyday tasks, e.g., data entry and marketing, etc.

A while back, and we mean some decades ago, AI might have been thought of as something futuristic, closely associated with flying cars or something. But now, we have some closer-to-ground applications of AI that can be vastly helpful for businesses of all types and sizes.

In this post, let’s look at some ways your business can (and should) use AI in 2023.

What is AI?

Truth be told, AI is a bit of a broad subject, and referring to it the way we are can be a little confusing. Before we head on to discuss the ways in which you should use AI for your business, let’s first clarify what we mean by it in the first place. AI basically stands for artificial intelligence. It is the field of computer science that deals with equipping software and machines to mimic human intelligence when performing their tasks.

When we refer to AI in some form usable by businesses, we refer to software, apps, and tools that utilize it, i.e., artificial intelligence.

Think about tools like Grammarly. It analyzes your text, checks if there are any issues in it, and, if there are, points them out.

Even this simple process of analyzing and pointing out errors is driven by AI since it involves software making a decision on itself without active intervention. This is basically the angle that we are going to be taking in the post below.

How Can Businesses Utilize AI?

This post that we’re writing is not some sort of comprehensive guide that’s going to tackle each and everything that businesses can do with AI. That would be a book, not a blog post. Rather, our purpose here is to highlight some of the main stuff and discuss them in such a way that helps our readers realize the potential of AI and its applications in the running of a typical business.

1. Quickening and Automating Everyday Tasks

There are some tasks that all businesses perform during an average working day. Assembling data, categorizing it, storing it, analyzing it, etc., are some examples of such everyday tasks. The same goes for things like record keeping, inventory tracking, etc.

Nowadays, there are AI solutions for more or less every such task that businesses have to do.

For example…

• Data entry: Businesses have to deal with large amounts of data on a daily basis. There are different AI-driven tools and software that aid in this process. For example, OCR extraction tools and scanning software, etc., can help in fetching data from images and pictures of physical documents.

• Content creation: Content creation is a term generally associated with marketing. But here, we mean content creation vis-à-vis the content that is used for everyday business tasks. This can include things like reports, emails, and other types of miscellaneous business documents. You can take some help in these types of tasks from content generation tools like ChatGPT.

While these are some examples of everyday tasks, the exact types of activities that a business may have to do can vary depending on what they deal in. Businesses should evaluable evaluate the stuff they have to do on a daily basis and utilize AI wherever possible.

2. Customer Support

One of the main things that define the quality and integrity of a business is the way it interacts with its customers. AI can play a role in enhancing and defining the customer support strategy of a business.

How exactly?

Let’s actually show you a little something before going on to talk about it. Here is HubSpot’s landing page.

What is that in the bottom right corner? You may ask. That right there is an AI chatbot.

AI chatbots can be set up on a website to help visitors with some of the main questions and queries that they may have. As you can see in the image above, the chatbot provides different premade questions that users can click on. The bot can then provide pre-set answers to the questions. In an online customer support routine, a chatbot doesn’t usually play the entire role itself. It is basically the preliminary cog in the whole machine that leads to the part where the visitor gets connected to a live chat agent.

But having these bots in place can be helpful since they can deal with the basic questions/confusions of the visitor on their own. We should back up a little and give some background to this whole discussion. If you have a business and you are looking for ways to adopt AI, it is safe to assume that your business does have a website. You can use different AI chatbot services – such as the one provided by HubSpot and Tidio, etc. – to set the gimmick up on your site.

Now, all of this may sound somewhat insignificant, but it can have a very positive effect on your business. It can improve the customer satisfaction rate and visitor retention rate, etc.

3. Marketing

Perhaps the area that AI has impacted the most is marketing. The way marketing efforts are planned, executed, and analyzed has been highly affected by AI. To give you an idea of what we mean here, we will talk about these steps and discuss the way AI has improved them.

Planning

Marketing planning involves different types of things depending on the specific type of marketing we’re talking about. In content marketing, planning can include things like keyword research, topic research, content brief creation, audience research, etc.

In email marketing, it can include things like email template creation, audience research (yes, we’re repeating) and contact list building, etc.

You get the idea.

Now, there are a lot of online AI tools that can be used for these types of planning. For example, tools like Ahrefs can be used for keyword research and content planning. Tools like Mailchimp, on the other hand, can be used particularly for email marketing planning, such as creating email journeys, templates, and contact lists.

Marketing Execution

After marketing is planned, it needs to be executed. Sticking to the same examples that we’ve done above, executing a content marketing plan would entail creating the content as per the decided recourse, optimizing it, and publishing it on a selected platform.

Similarly, when an email marketing strategy is executed, it entails the creation of the specific email (i.e., as a follow-up for the basic template) and its subsequent sending to the recipients. Just as there are tools for the various planning activities (as discussed earlier), there are likewise tools available for the carrying out the marketing activities themselves.

Tools like Google Docs can be, for one, useful for creating written content, whereas tools like Rephrase and Grammar Check can be useful for improving its quality. Tools like Canva, on the other hand, can be helpful in creating visuals.

Analysis and Improvement

Once the marketing efforts are carried out, the last step is to analyze their outputs and look for areas of improvement. For the most part, you can use the same types of tools for running analyses that you can for marketing planning.

Consider the example of Ahrefs.

You can use it to research keywords during the planning phase, and then you can later use it to measure the traffic coming to your website/webpage once you publish, say, a blog post. In the same way, if you are using Mailchimp for your email marketing campaign, you can use it post-blast to find out how many people opened the emails and how many people straight up deleted them.

Once you analyze your efforts, you can improve the shortcomings in your approaches and make them more effective.

Conclusion

Embracing AI can be somewhat hard for companies and businesses that have gone without it for the greater part of their existence. But difficult as it may be, it can be highly beneficial – something that we have described amply in the post above. Using AI can be a game-changer for your business. You can enhance the productivity of your everyday tasks, engage in better marketing efforts and improve your customer care quality.