AI Expands Business Capabilities

AI is taking the world by storm and introducing a whole new way to do business. Companies are using AI business integration to improve their operations, products and services in a variety of ways as it has become more prevalent in 2023.

From a marketing perspective, content creation and service are the top ways AI business integration is helping business processes. How can you use AI to be at the top of your market?

In this article, Eric Hagelin from Clear Skies Marketing Group shares a few of the best tips for AI business integration. He took input from several other Gunnison Valley companies at the ICELab to give real-life examples of how AI can expand small business capabilities.

AI Availability

Currently, Chat GPT and Bard are leading the charge for AI large language models. Chat GPT brought AI into the mainstream, and it currently excels in topic research and creating content. The blog outlines and topic writings it creates are great, but the database is outdated. Chat GPT is now competing with Google’s Bard, which offers real-time internet access. This improves upon Chat GPT’s model of just accessing databases to searching up-to-date information.

Google Bard has the power of Google Search to back it up. Bard is great for updated information seeking for topics you wish to write about or know more about. Image, audio and video AI are on the horizon. Think about having an AI spokesperson for your company that looks and sounds exactly like a real person. This opens the door for a lot of small businesses that don’t have the budget to hire actors and create a company persona. Or business owners that just don’t feel like getting in front of a camera. This isn’t going to take away jobs for companies like Meyvn Creative because of their stance in the marketplace, but it will likely eliminate the low-end production companies.

Content Creation

Writing is tough, especially if you’ve written about the same topic for some time. To be viewed as the authority in your field, you need to continue to show that you are the top expert by showing up in search engine results for your area of expertise.

Try using AI for content outlines with an input such as: “Provide a unique blog post outline for AI integrations in 2023 from the perspective of a tech geek talking to an 8-year-old.” You could also create an outline for a blog similar to this one explaining the benefits of PR for outdoor industry startups.

Creating more specific inputs will help create a better output. Chat GPT is notorious for regurgitating information, so you’ll most likely get something output that has already been written before. It’s important to use it only as a brainstorming tool and not the final product. Chat GPT’s results are not always accurate.

Customer Service

Chatbots are getting very smart. If designed well, they are sometimes hard to distinguish from an actual customer service associate. Chatbots can help customers navigate content and provide answers to common questions.

Chatbots can be misleading, because when we click on the “chat now” button, it’s often to speak to a real human being. In sales, this first-level connection is critical. If the person or bot messes up the first contact, then your business is out for the long run. Whether chatbots will be useful in customer service depends on the specific industry and how complex the most common questions are.

Sam Degenhard from Campfire Ranch has taken a hard stance against chatbot AI business integration.

“Many of our competitors in the camping industry have moved towards bots online, and that goes against the very core of camping—bringing people together,” he said. “I’d rather have a human find the relevant information to give to another human to create a better user experience.”

Chandra Proffitt from Resurrection Land Cruisers will tell you that the last thing she wants is for her customers to get into a bot loop when calling a support line.

AI In Marketing

AI has been used in Google AdWords and Meta for some time now to determine audiences that fit your company. These targeted ads can help businesses lower ad spend by targeting specific customers. They see that Jill likes your mountain biking product, and Jane is similar to Jill because they both like mountain biking, so Jane gets your advertisement instead of Joe, who is a video gamer.

You can also use Chat GPT or Bard to create compelling headlines for ads. Using an input that requests “10 unique and compelling headlines for women seeking pants they can pee outside in” will give you 10 ideas in seconds. Not that Gnara Apparel needs more unique selling points, but you get the idea.

Day to Day Operations

Calendars and scheduling are must-haves for entrepreneurs. CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot are integrating AI to create better scheduling and tasks based on email integrations. Say that David is writing a simple email asking to play disc golf at a certain time, the AI will read the message and create a calendar block automatically then ask, “Are you going to play disc golf with David at this time?”

This can also be used in scheduling if you sync your calendar to your email. It can automatically respond with “I’m booked for that time, but here are some availabilities that I do have.”

AI can take over some of these tasks and help you get more organized, though it cannot completely drive your day-to-day operations.

Product to Market

AI can create websites and logos from ideas that you present it. This can get your product to market faster. AI can also create a full business plan, financial analysis, competitor analysis, SOPs and predictions, all within a few hours. It can also help you create a wholesale agreement as a startup.

What else is AI being used for?

AI is used in banking for fraud prevention, retail for inventory management, manufacturing for quality control, energy to reduce emissions and healthcare to diagnose diseases. (Thank you, Bard, for those.)

The healthcare topic is an especially valuable one and one that may be be at the forefront of technological advancement. One study of early cancer detection had a 95.5% accuracy rate, which outperformed humans.

AI also determined that cancer could be predicted if there was a ruler in the picture because every cancer screening had a ruler in it to measure the size of the anomaly.

If we do get to a point where AI is trained better, then we can save more lives due to higher accuracy of early screenings and that’s something I’m all for.

How you can use AI for your business

AI can help offload some of the more tedious and routine tasks of running a business. It can be used to help with marketing by creating outlines for web content and customer profiles, which can help with customer adoption. It can also help write ad copy. Depending on your industry, it can also be helpful for customer service tasks. Utilizing it for day-to-day operations such as scheduling can help you become more organized.

Eric Hagelin | 970-596-5820

Clear Skies Marketing Group LLC

https://www.clearskiesmarketing.com/