How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Improve Your Business Operations

Artificial intelligence (AI), as cutting-edge technology, has revolutionized and enhanced the way people conduct business operations in the modern world.

Learn how it can help take your business operations to the next level.  

My name is Innocent, a machine learning and artificial intelligence expert from IPF Softwares, an award-winning software development company, focused on designing and developing impactful digital solutions for businesses in Africa. 

In this article, I will explain and demonstrate common use cases of Artificial Intelligence in Africa and how business leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs can use artificial intelligence to leverage data to improve their businesses operations and boost their revenue using Artificial Intelligence-powered digital solutions.

Introduction: Artificial Intelligence And Related Fields  

Many are perplexed by concepts such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. 

Worry not, I won't dive into these difficult technical topics, for the time being, I will do my best to use examples and common use cases to explain to you the difference between them.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, well below is a picture that will save you time reading the next few paragraphs and I actually won’t mind if you have understood it and skipped to “ How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Improve Your business operations “ : )

Oh, nice! I see you're a curious person and still interested to learn about the definitions and common use cases, and that is just perfect.

What is Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a wide-ranging branch of computer science involving the ability to make machines and software more “intelligent” to easily perform tasks that require human intelligence more effectively and efficiently, typical examples being capable of thinking and acting humanely.

Simply put, it means embedding a certain type of intelligence into software or machines to perform tasks as the human brain does and hence the name artificial intelligence.

Use Case: Loan default prediction for banks

The crucial functioning of the banks mostly depends on accurate credit risk assessment, often known as loan default prediction.

This often becomes more difficult and time-consuming and eventually led to the inaccuracy in loan default prediction in banks hence through using artificial intelligence this can be easy, through leveraging demographic variables, past payment data, credit data, and application data from users and hence intelligent loan prediction systems in banks can be created to anticipate loan default prediction with greater accuracy.

Other Artificial Intelligence Use Cases 

• Google search results - for example, Google uses artificial intelligence to surface relevant results based on comparable search habits or user intent, allowing the ordinary person to discover what they're looking for.
• Music suggestion examples on Spotify, boomplay, apple music, and others.
• Social media feeds curation on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

And many more can be done with AI.

In short, AI is what enables something like this to happen

AI Myth  : 

You need a significantly large budget to implement Artificial intelligence into your digital solution. 

Reality: 

You don’t necessarily need a large budget to implement artificial intelligence solutions. It may have been true in the past, but with current technology, the situation has changed.

Early days, only the tech giants ( Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google ), could afford to build Artificial Intelligence Powered software solutions. 

The cost of developing AI solutions has decreased because of the availability of a variety of low-cost tools, libraries, and frameworks that have made AI more accessible to small businesses and startups. Days will come AI solutions would cost almost the same as the websites today :) 

What is Machine Learning? 

Machine Learning is a part of Artificial Intelligence where the machine or software is able to learn from the available data, recognize patterns from the data and perform prediction or detection depending on certain scenarios without being programmed explicitly, this helps to have the most intelligent AI systems.

Use Case: Loan default prediction for banks

Through leveraging the data from the users, Machine learning-powered algorithms can be used to create models by recognizing the patterns from the data to perform loan default detection without explicitly programming this problem or based on human ability.

This saves time, reduces costs, and makes the process more accurate.

Machine Learning Myth: There’s No Difference Between Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning.

Reality : 

Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial intelligence that employs statistical algorithms and keeps used of the data to enable machines to learn and improve over time without being programmed explicitly. 

Simply put, you can have artificial intelligence without machine learning.

However, machine learning has become a field in its own right as a result of its widespread applications in artificial intelligence and hence many fail to distinguish between these two terms.

What is Data Science?

Data Science mostly involves extracting information and insights from noisy, structured, and unstructured data, and applying data knowledge and actionable insights across a wide range of application areas in decision making. A typical example in machine learning is to have much performance in predicting loan defaults in banks due to good insights obtained from the data. 

Therefore, it begins with data science, in which data is collected and cleaned, engineered, and organized for machine learning algorithms.

From there intelligence and powerful models are created by training algorithms from the given data, then the models are programmed and deployed in software applications or integrated in machines to perform some intelligent actions based on the inputs given to them.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the difference between the common terms.

Let's dive into today's topic. 

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Improve Your business operations

With the ever-increasing amount of data available today, as well as the ever-increasing expectation of precision and personalization by customers on the software products they use, African businesses can no longer rely on traditional software development approaches to solve complex problems since they are mostly based on rules to achieve success.

With artificial intelligence, these drastic shifts have opened up a new arena of possibilities for driving corporate success via actionable insights created from using customer data.

Below are some ways that can help businesses create personalized and sales-driving experiences for users with artificial intelligence.

Customer personalization, segmentation, and targeted marketing.

By leveraging AI  businesses can start to predict and eventually satisfy the demands of their customers. Knowing a customer's wants and knowing what to sell to each consumer has always been critical to increasing a company's income.

Customers have incredibly limited time in today's environment of rising digital engagement, and there are far too many organizations attempting to advertise their products to them. This explains why it's becoming increasingly important to sell only what appeals to each customer, as well as to know to who to promote each company's goods.

Companies can now utilize AI to forecast and target who to sell a particular product to based on data acquired from customers' online actions, thereby increasing the possibilities of sales and improving the effectiveness of marketing activities while lowering total marketing costs.

Customer support automation using chatbots

Nowadays, artificial intelligence has shown outstanding performance in saving most of the business by harvesting the use of AI to create intelligent chatbots. 

Customers can now communicate with a company in real-time to address concerns, place orders, obtain information, and do practically anything they could do in a conversation with a human customer-care person.

This helps businesses to go to the next level by having high customers engagement in business , lowering the costs. As I know any successful business is for customers,if customers are satisfied with the services provided, the business will succeed.

Customer predictive analytics and product recommendation 

Through using AI, companies can be able to recommend products that will keep customers' interest and satisfy their desires in order to boost the success of marketing efforts and customer engagement with a company's product.

Companies must now use AI to forecast which product to propose based on user habits and behaviors.

This is a very important aspect in business and there is why artificial intelligence plays an important role since this kind of problem can not be solved using traditional software development approaches.

Companies can also use past data to correctly predict potential percentage increases or decrease in demand beforehand so that as a business owner you can proactively adjust your stock accordingly. 

Sentimental analysis and topic modeling usage

Sentimental analysis can be easily described as the technique to identify and extract the affective and subjective state of the information, simply to check the positivity or negativity of the texts.

A typical example in social media tweets.

Topic modeling can automatically classify the documents into certain groups of topics and make it easier to organize large documents of textual data.

Both of these can be used by companies to transform the business to the next level.

Companies are now using AI to generate automated business reports without the need for human oversight, as well as sentiment analysis to determine how people perceive their brand based on numerous online comments, tweets, and other information about the organization.

Companies can continually understand how customers feel about their products and services by using sentiment analysis.

This helps in the improvement of service quality and customized product offerings.

Bottom-line

In order to satisfy our personal and professional needs, we use Artificial intelligence technology every day. It benefits both businesses and individuals by giving creative ideas from data analysis and solutions to challenging business problems.

It also benefits us by automating our daily routines.

Almost every industrial sector in the world is using Artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline business processes and expand market reach.

Well, you made it to the end, do you have a product that needs to be developed using artificial intelligence?

We will help scale your digital solution by using cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and make the impact you want the most.

Our main focus is on creating, developing, and innovating digital solutions for impact-oriented enterprises and initiatives in Africa that connect individuals to social and economic opportunities.

Book a meeting with an expert today to analyze the scaling potential of your digital solution