As artificial intelligence has moved from a futuristic concept to an accessible tool used in everyday life, we’re just beginning to see its implications across a variety of businesses. From improving customer service to identifying fraud, AI has brought forth meaningful change when it comes to sparking innovation and change within a company.
While AI may feel overly saturated, only 22% of employees regularly use the technology in their work, indicating a large gap between access and use.
In order to remain competitive, executives must tap into the power of this new technology to spark innovation and encourage positive growth and change amongst their employees. And they can do so by using AI to streamline operations, drive personalized customer experiences, and enhance research and development.
Streamline Operation and Workflow
Employees today are spending a staggering 58% of their time on work coordination, with nearly 9 hours a week responding to emails and nearly 8 hours in meetings. While some of this can be valuable to move projects forward, it takes employees away from deep focus to build out strategies and advance skilled work – the tasks that require human creativity and thought. Not to mention, even when focused on strategic thinking, employees are working longer hours and taking more time to complete their work to make up for the work coordination that takes up so much of their days.
It’s no surprise that employees then feel burnt out, preventing them from delivering high-quality, innovative work. Instead, by using AI, meetings can be shortened, workflows can be automated – or at the very least streamlined – and employees are freed to focus on the jobs they were hired to do.
Employees can use this additional time to conduct research, brainstorm, and be creative, tackling new problems with new innovations. Rather than focusing on monotonous tasks, employees are empowered to break new ground and think creatively to bring exciting and unconventional ideas to the table.
Drive Personalized Customer Experiences
To be a truly customer-centric company, you need to deeply understand who your customers are to deliver connected, efficient, and proactive experiences. But understanding your customers can take time, often requiring additional research and resources to analyze consumer preferences, build out a customer profile, and develop customer segments.
AI can look at massive amounts of customer data to build personalized recommendations to fit each individual’s needs. This data can include everything from demographics and purchasing history to website and social interactions. With AI, this analysis can be done almost instantaneously, and thus provide employees with the necessary insights to offer personalized recommendations and limit the friction when interacting with your brand.
Beyond providing your customers with an improved, hyper-personalized experience, employees are then able to take a critical look at the data to glean insights, thus incorporating this into their larger strategies and, in turn, develop better products and services.
Enhance Research and Development
Businesses spend over $600 billion each year on research and development in the United States, allocating large amounts of resources to bring new products and services to fruition. While timelines can vary by industry, it can take, on average, up to a year from initial idea to public availability, taking employees away from advancing other projects.
Similar to personalized experiences, companies can instead leverage AI and predictive analytics to make informed decisions about their product development, identifying new features or entirely new products that align with their customers’ demands.
Here, AI can accelerate the time-consuming tasks to quickly gather, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data and forecast insights, without forgoing quality. For R&D teams, this can help make more informed decisions while simultaneously reducing the risk of costly mistakes, thus bringing forth a better product to market faster.
In the age of AI, embracing innovation is no longer an option; it’s a necessity for staying competitive in the market. By harnessing the power of AI in operations and workflow, customer experiences, and research and development, we’re creating a culture of innovation that will shape the future of our business and unlock the full potential of AI to spark growth within our company.
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