3 Questions to Ask Yourself When Considering an AI Project
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You’ve heard about Artificial Intelligence, and how it has the potential to change just about everything. You may have even seen other companies or competitors use AI successfully to reduce workloads or enter new markets and thought to yourself “WE NEED THAT!”
According to Gartner's 2019 CIO Survey of more than 3,000 executives in 89 countries, they found that AI implementation grew a whopping 270 percent in the past four years, and 37 percent in the past year alone.
It’s true what they say – if you’re not at least putting your business in a position to use AI today, in the next 3-5 years you will be losing big time. Don’t worry, we’re here to make AI easy.
There are three key questions you need to ask yourself (and your team) to identify potential AI projects.
AI can do a lot of things, and there’s been a lot of media coverage on AI one day taking over the jobs of humans. We’re really far off from that, if it ever happens. One of the simplest ways to determine an impactful use of AI in your business, is to think of tasks that can be automated, not entire jobs. AI is a great automation tool to help people complete repeatable tasks of their jobs more effectively.
One great example of this is in radiology. There are several tasks for a radiologist to complete when handling a patient's needs, one of which is reading images to identify indicators of diseases. Artificial Intelligence can be used to assist in reading this imagery to make the radiologist’s conclusions more accurate.
A radiologist on their own is about 86% accurate in reading imagery. A group of radiologists is about 94% accurate. When you overlay machine learning, that number increases even further to around 98% accuracy. ( Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10207474 ). That’s saving lives!
AI can’t do things like consult with the patient and provide the emotional aspect of patient management, but it can increase the coverage, support and accuracy of image reading so the radiologist can do their job better.
Think about the tasks that can be automated within your business to make your employees more effective. Are they doing something repetitive that could be automated? Is there a particular area they could improve upon by having a machine help with those tasks?
2. What are the main drivers of business value?
By thinking about AI use cases in terms of driving business value, you will start spotting ways for new opportunities to attain scale or growth in your company. Suppose you’re a B2C company that cares about delivering solid customer service, but you may be lacking the volume of support staff to meet demand. You understand it’s an important part of the customer experience and drives up customer retention. You may consider machine learning chat bots.
AI chatbots can be used in a variety of ways. They can answer simple questions, sell products, and even entertain their audience. Most often, companies use chatbots to respond quicker to their customers who have contacted customer service with an issue.
Over time, the data has shown that AI-enabled chatbots are achieving customer satisfaction scores at about 98% in many cases. That's even better than most human-only scores. As we all know, higher customer satisfaction scores lead to higher customer retention and, ultimately, a positive bottom line.
Think about what makes your business valuable to your customers. What are the ways you can drive an even better value for them? What are ways you can differentiate from your competition and add value that once didn't exist?
3. What are the main pain points in your business?
Paint points. Every business has them. These are opportunities to be better at something - perhaps to be more efficient, to reduce costs, or to improve employee morale. With this question, try to think about areas of your business that are major pain points, and consider if AI is a solution for you.
For example, inventory management is often a pain point for businesses. Clunky processes, missed opportunities, too much or too little inventory on hand. These problems can become business-crippling pain points, if they aren’t already.
AI can be used to facilitate predictive ordering to restock inventory, perhaps adjust orders based on demand and environmental conditions, or improve resource management by taking many factors into consideration automatically. These AI systems make companies smarter by allowing the tracking of inventory, equipment, and people, while making predictive recommendations based on the data you’re feeding it. All of this leading to saved time, money, effort, and potentially attrition.
Think about the major pain points your business suffers from. Are there gaps that could be filled by letting machine learning do more of the work? Is there a set of data points that could be used to predict better outcomes for the pain points your business currently is trying to solve for?
If something important about your business came to mind when you were reading this, we would love to chat with you about it. Don’t let a lack of an AI strategy hold you back – AI is attainable and Louder Co. Is here to make it easy.