We live in a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is driving many of the most significant technologies of today. AI technology has provided a platform for the smallest and largest businesses to grow through the use of more intelligent business processes.
Teaching computers to automate and communicate has lead to smarter decision making which has transformed the entire outlook of business as we know it. In this article, we’re going to explore 3 things AI can do for your business. But first, let’s take a look at what AI actually is.
What is AI?
The business community acknowledges the term artificial intelligence as the buzzword “AI”. AI is the ability of computers to perform tasks that typically humans would perform. Generally, we use the term to describe the project of developing systems with human characteristics. This includes the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from experience through deep learning.
There are so many different types of artificial intelligence and many of them have worked their way into our every day lives. Think about autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, speech recognition and now of course chat bots. Although you may not realise it, you’re probably dealing with some type of ai most days.
As of 2021, Statista reported that the Global AI market sits at 327.5 billion USD. As a leader in automation, AI-based computers do very well in repetitive task behaviors. Because of that, we can make them simulate intelligence.
Using special algorithms, AI can analyze large selections of data. This gives them the capability of communicating with people and making key decisions. Businesses are investing their belief in AI and its ability to entirely reshape their future. Once the subject of people’s imaginations, AI is now commonplace in their lives.
Despite the business benefits of AI, many employees are concerned that the changing landscape may have a drastic impact on their working lives.
How will AI impact employees?
According to a Tidio survey, 69% of college graduates believe AI could take their job or make them irrelevant in a few years. With businesses struggling to avoid workplace infections, replacing jobs with automated machinery has undergone additional consideration.
And some fear if employees’ jobs are taken away from them now, they may never return again. But four scholars of AI consider this belief to be vastly overstated. And here’s why.
Most jobs remain more complex than people realize. And although AI is having a profound effect on many industries, people have a tendency to believe that the growth of automation will eventually see it take over. But there’s a key factor as to why it hasn’t yet.
Could AI “take over”?
Jobs are made up of a myriad of tasks that are not easily automated and cannot be processed without the support of humans. The introduction of AI processes isn’t to eliminate jobs. Instead, the aim is to remove the dull, tedious, and repetitive tasks within them.
AI’s ability to process a large amount of data will improve the speed and accuracy of the way we work. Having employees using AI technology is strengthening and enhancing our workforce capabilities, which is why it’s viewed as invaluable by most businesses.
Things AI can do for your Business
Create business insights to make smarter decisions
Humans weren’t built to spend hours of their day sifting through data. So, they built AI applications that could do it for them.
Business insights are generated by combining data and analysis to find meaning in and understand how a situation is affecting a business. These give businesses the understanding of any issues that need to be resolved and provide them with the knowledge they need to improve their overall efficiency. Better forecasting from business insights can also help them to gain a competitive advantage.
Finding meaning in data collection
Business insights are all about using data to create healthy change. When a business collects data, it’s useless unless it’s extracted and processed for a purpose. So, we’re going to explore the ways businesses can use AI to achieve significant data to provide better outcomes.
Using different types of analytics, businesses can unearth new insights to better themselves. These types can be broken down:
- Descriptive – Descriptive analytics is using historical data to identify trends and relationships. This gives a business a comprehensive overview of past performance to help create an informed decision-making process.
- Predictive – Predictive analytics is using historical data and models to make predictions of future events. By using this data, this type of analysis can help to identify patterns and trends to determine the likelihood of similar results occurring in the future. This puts businesses in a position of empowerment by being able to use this information to forecast the future.
- Prescriptive – Prescriptive analytics factors data about possible situations or scenarios, resources, past performance and current performance. From here, they can strategize a course of action for either immediate or long-term decisions.
Analytics = Actions
These analytics can be very useful in determining a direction for your business to make healthy changes. Let’s use an example.
Maybe you’ve become so used to manually scheduling your employees that you don’t want to give in to change. But the endless nights you’ve spent fixing it to keep your employees content and find the best fit schedule has sent you into overdrive. You’ve come to realize that using a form of employee scheduling software will give you all the descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics you need to be as competent as possible. It will give you the business insights you need and many more benefits.
AI won’t just provide business insights from your scheduling. It will do a great deal more. Let’s discuss how AI can improve your scheduling.
Improve your scheduling
When it comes to employee scheduling, you don’t have the hours in the day to identify the most suitable employees to fit your schedule. Filtering through spreadsheets to assess your employee history is going to take up a lot of your time. And that’s why utilizing Celayix AI’s capabilities will make your scheduling process a million times easier.
Let’s look at how integrating our employee scheduling software can help your business.
Recommending best-fit employees
When Celayix AI suggests employees for a shift, it will not only show those employees that are qualified for the shift, but also give them ratings and rank them for best-fit. Every business wants their best employees to be working their shifts. It just so happens that this tool allows you to find them with the click of a button.
In addition to this tool, Celayix uses AI to add value-based recommendations for autofill and shift-bidding. These tools help to improve the efficiency of your scheduling by making it easier and faster, but also boosting productivity by filling the most competent employees to fulfill your shifts.
But, what if you’ve assigned your shifts and now an employee can’t work their shift?
Finding replacements
No matter how great you think your schedule is, there will always come a time when it requires change. Your business and its schedule aren’t untouchable. Eventually someone will get sick or will submit a time-off request.
Celayix’s Find Replacement feature uses AI to provide a superior alternative to typical shift-swapping solutions. If managers allow it, employees are able to drop a shift. But rather than have to search through files of data or settle for any employee to fill the void, this tool provides the manager with a best-fit replacement in a matter of seconds.
It’s important to realize that improving your scheduling can go a long way in keeping your customers happy. But using AI to enhance your customer experience is something that many businesses are looking to invest in.
Provide a better customer experience
No matter what product or service you provide, your customers will expect easy solutions to any issues they may have.
As we mentioned previously, there’s a common misconception that AI is here to take over. But in actual fact, it’s only here to improve the current processes we already have. And when it comes to communication, AI has the capacity to monitor language, speech patterns and psychographics to predict future customer needs. But for the more basic commands, some services use AI chatbots to deliver their responses.
Have AI chatbots revolutionized customer service?
An AI chatbot can be a customer service representative, a virtual assistant, or an information-gathering tool. As the first port of call, chatbots can be put in place to determine what exactly the customer is looking for.
With the ability to answer questions, and automate repetitive tasks and other simple requests, it’s easy to see why so many businesses use them. The speed at which they process answers makes them more than satisfactory to many customers. But until conversational AI is available, many will remain skeptical.
Room to develop
While AI chatbots can be a huge time saver for many businesses, they can also cause a lot of frustration. Sometimes an angry customer just wants to pick up the phone and explain their issue in great detail.
But for the more complex cases, AI chatbots can often encounter difficulty in understanding natural language. Their high capacity for misunderstanding leaves them a long way from being an ideal solution on their own. They’re also really expensive to install and maintain.
The major advantage of machine learning is anchored in automation and the ability of AI to continue to learn independently. AI chatbots will continue on their trajectory of growth and development, which will eventually see us interacting with them as if they were a human. This will make them a far more powerful and invaluable tool to the businesses looking to revolutionize their customer service approach.
Now that we’ve discussed 3 things that AI can do for your business, let’s review its importance to the world we live in today.
So, how important is AI for businesses?
AI transformation is on a steep upward curve. The process of driving digital transformation through AI is leveraging all business processes and changing how value is delivered to your customers through your employees.
It’s giving businesses a faster, more cohesive approach to the way they handle daily interactions and eliminating human error through automated processes. It also has the ability to review large patterns of data to identify business insights. These insights provide a more informed decision-making approach and are minimizing business risk through making change.
Should businesses prepare to evolve?
Failing to evolve may leave your business susceptible to becoming digitally stale. You’re existing business processes will become less efficient to the competitors who are open to growing.
We’re not saying you should jump at the first opportunity to integrate a form of AI in your business. We’re saying that you should at the very least consider AI and how the different processes can benefit your business in the short and long term. A willingness to embrace the opportunities it can present may give your business that all-important competitive advantage.
It’s important to realize that AI is in a period of transition, and we fully expect that it will develop into something even more valuable in the future. But for now, we should embrace AI and the path it is paving to make businesses more efficient than they’ve ever been before. If you’d like to learn more about how Celayix AI can help you, watch the video below. You can also contact a Solutions Advisor to arrange a free, custom demo.
Video: Using AI Employee Scheduling for Your Business
