Techs that will help make your business to thrive

Artificial intelligence will play a big role in shaping Africa’s education system. PHOTO | POOL

What you need to know:

  • Accurate decision-making data-driven management decisions at lower cost led to a different style of management, where corporate leaders will ask the right questions to machines.
  • With their self-learning abilities, ML and AI systems can adapt to new undiscovered cases and further enhance detection over time.

With all the buzz around machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and big data, enterprises are now becoming curious about the applications and benefits of these in business.

A lot of people have probably heard of these, but do not really know what exactly it is, what business-related problems it can solve, or the value it can add to their business. There’s no doubt that AI and ML will be the most important tech of the 21st century.

The only thing experts don’t fully agree on is the extent of change to the face of each separate industry and to society as a whole.

How AI and ML can help any business is the question that is on every entrepreneur’s mind, and as always happens with disruptive technologies, the first executives to integrate AI and ML into their companies will reap tremendous rewards while latecomers will risk going out of business.

AI and ML is steadily passing into everyday business use, from workflow management to trend predictions, AI and ML have many different uses in business, they also provide new business opportunities.

Accurate decision-making data-driven management decisions at lower cost led to a different style of management, where corporate leaders will ask the right questions to machines, rather than to human experts.

Machines will then analyse the data and will come up with the recommended results, which can help leaders and their subordinates take better decisions. Thanks to the power of data visualisation tools, apps can transform complicated data into easy-to-digest insights. As a result, users can make use of complex information to improve their financial decision-making.

Recommending the right product is an important aspect of any sales and marketing strategy including upselling and cross-selling. ML and AI models will analyse the purchase history of a customer and based on that they identify those products or services from your inventory in which a customer is interested.

The algorithm will identify hidden patterns among the items and will then group similar products into clusters. Such a model will enable businesses to make better product recommendations for their customers, thereby motivating product purchase.

In this way, unsupervised learning helps in creating a superior product-based recommendation system.

Manage and analyse your data AI and ML can help you interpret and mine your data more efficiently than ever before and provide meaningful insight into your assets, your brand, staff or customers

Fraud prevention with the e-commerce boom, the number of scams online has shot through the roof. The major stores dedicate great efforts in order to combat fraud on their platforms. But sometimes such attempts cause more harm than good.

Analytics tools collect evidence and analyse data necessary for conviction. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools then learn and monitor user’s behavioural patterns to identify rarity and warning signs of fraud attempts and incidents.

With their self-learning abilities, ML and AI systems can adapt to new undiscovered cases and further enhance detection over time. They will transform e-commerce and save a lot of money for business owners. So, invest in anti-fraud AI to protect your customers from the usual scammers and false accusations.

Easy spam detection is one of the earliest problems solved by ML and AI, few years ago email providers made use of rule-based techniques to filter out spam. However, with the advent of technology, spam filters are making new rules using brain-like neural networks to eliminate spam mails.

The neural networks recognise phishing messages and junk mail by evaluating the rules across a huge network of computers.

Customer support as physical distancing becomes the new normal, businesses will opt more and more for this type of technology to solve customer issues. Brick and mortar offices are not expected to disappear anytime soon, but they will most likely be relegated for specific activities.

The future of AI and ML is all about making your customers personalised offers, predicting future trends in order to optimise your stock and improve logistics.

Media AI and ML will drive the next revolution in mass media comparable to the advent of the internet. Machine Learning will become the advertisers’ best friend, with the help of AI, they’ll gain a deep insight into the consumers’ hearts and minds and be able to target them with increasingly personalised messages.

Simplifiying time-intensive documentation in data entry, data duplication and inaccuracy are the major issues confronted by organisations wanting to automate their data entry process. Well, this situation can be significantly improved by predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms.

With this, machines can perform time-intensive data entry tasks, leaving your skilled resources free to focus on other value-adding duties, all these applications make ML and AI top value-producing digital innovation trend.

Furthermore, ML and AI enables businesses to effortlessly discover new trends and patterns from large and diverse data sets. Businesses can now automate analysis to interpret business interactions, which were traditionally done by humans, to take evidence-based actions.

This empowers enterprises to deliver new, personalized or differentiated products and services. Therefore, considering ML and AI as strategic initiatives can be lucrative decisions. However, deployment might carry certain business risks. Therefore, it is better to approach investment decisions with utmost care.

Ndirangu Ngunjiri, Managing Partner Watermark Consultants

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