AI & ML for Small Businesses
Published on : Friday 04-02-2022
Companies are now understanding and leveraging the power of technology in automating their systems, says Darshana Thakkar.
In this digital era, many cutting-edge technologies exist. These include:
1. Augmented Reality
2. Virtual reality
3. 3D printing
4. Data mining
5. Blockchain
6. Artificial intelligencTechnologies are revolutionising the worlde
7. Machine learning
8. Superfast broadband, and
9. Nanotechnology.
These and many more modern technologies are revolutionising the world with their application at a different stage of human life.
These technologies are being used extensively across the world to aid comfort to human life as well as to improve the business performance of the business empire.
Many large businesses have adopted various emerging technologies to improve their business performance.
Business owners of small organisations are also using various technologies directly or indirectly in their day-to-day activities. But adoption of these technologies for business purposes is very limited to a few options. The main reason for the lower technology adoption rate in MSME companies are:
1. Awareness about the relevant technology for the respective business function
2. Higher initial cost, and
3. Fear of change and that of RoI.
With my passion to drive Digital Transformation in MSME companies, hereby I am trying to explain the benefits and area of application to use artificial intelligence and machine learning in a small enterprise.
First, let us understand the basics of artificial intelligence. It is the branch of computer systems that attempts to model and apply the intelligence of the human mind. AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour.
The best popular example of artificial intelligence in our life is an intelligent digital personal assistant. For example
1. Google Now for Android
2. Siri for iOS/Apple phone
3. Cortana for Windows, and
4. Alexa for Amazon.
These are AI-based digital intelligent assistants for the respective platform. We can use them to make calls, send messages, set reminders, take notes, recognise music, find great restaurants, find places, check the calendar, and many more.
Similarly, being small enterprises, we can use these technologies in our day-to-day business to improve productivity and profitability.
In its simple form, artificial intelligence is a machine that thinks like a person.
Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence, which is broadly defined as the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour. In short, ML is a computer algorithm that uses data and experience to respond to a specific situation.
Traditionally computers are designed to give output simply based on the input information. They weren’t designed to learn. Computers that use machine learning can look at different facts, the way a human does, turn those facts into concepts, and use those concepts to compute better and faster.
In large organisations, the players have resources that small enterprises don’t have. They’ve got research departments that can spend weeks researching how competitors are positioning their products, or how customers are reacting to their newest products. MSME organisations probably don’t have that luxury. However, Machine learning can give the insight in a few minutes that would have been available after hours of research. It’s that time-saving element that helps small business owners.
By the combined use of ML and AI, a small business can leverage the benefits of technology for better customer satisfaction, cost reduction with improved quality and delivery.
Key functions where MSME can use AI and ML easily and cost-effectively:
1. Product Quality Assurance
For manufacturing companies, product quality is very important. Every specification, parameters, aesthetics, packing, etc., are very crucial for managing the reputation of the company. Product quality is something related to renewal and new business. However, manually watching and evaluating each product as it goes through the manufacturing process is time-consuming and costly in terms of man-hour and its cost.
By using AI, we can automate the scanning and evaluation of products. Using machine learning, the software can detect defects/deviations in the product. That allows to correct them before they reach the customer.
2. Marketing
A company may have a great product or solution. But if we don't market it correctly, the customers and prospective customers won't have the right view. Sometimes, they won't even know about its existence.
AI can help by automatically recommending marketing strategies. It can see behavioural patterns that brought people to our virtual business place and caused them to buy. Then, all needed is to repeat the process and scale.
This doesn’t require a huge budget that only the biggest companies can afford. There are many applications that everyday businesses can implement into their daily workflow. With this, we can eliminate errors, improve efficiency and ultimately turn more profits for the enterprise. In our social media, we see the sponsored ads as a good example of the same.
3. Customer service
For business, especially in B2C categories, an easy first line of contact with the enterprise is an important aspect for customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
A very popular and affordable solution to provide online customer response is the chatbot. A chatbot is providing the first line of contact to a customer query on an online platform.
This quick-to-implement and effective solution can tie together a business' social media accounts while delivering on the first few steps in the customer journey. This is helpful to increase client loyalty by providing immediate contact and conversation.
The benefits of chatbots to small businesses are immense:
a. For simple questions and requests, chatbots can search company support information to provide answers or direct customers to the right resource without ever having to involve an employee. Available 24/7, customers don’t have to wait until business hours to solve their problems.
b. If something needs to be escalated to a human, the AI algorithm in a chatbot can go through a script to get basic information and even their preferred channel for help (phone call, text, email, etc). The chatbot can then direct the request to the best representative for that scenario, saving them time while providing a better customer experience.
4. Cybersecurity
With growing digitalisation security of the system is of the utmost importance. Nowadays companies can no longer leave security as the last priority. If you are hacked, your company’s or customer’s information can fall into the wrong hands. The use of AI to automate security measures and continually scan the system to alert for potential risks is a very efficient way of system security.
5. Business scheduling and appointments
Appropriate customer communication and customer appointments are the life blood of many businesses. However, far too many companies neglect this to schedule them in the right intervals.
With the help of AI, now companies can take advantage of the ability to schedule customers automatically. Based on the input of pre-planned scheduling rules, the software can learn the best times for your team and your clients. Other business communications with the clients are also possible with the usage of AI and ML. For example, if a customer order is booked, an acknowledgement including the delivery schedule can automatically be sent to the customer. Similarly, while the product is ready to ship, and once the shipping documents are generated, the automated message can intimate the customer.
6. Estimate of manpower requirement
Determining the exact requirement of various categories of manpower, adding contract labour, etc., are the big challenging tasks for the management. Enrolment of more employees can waste resources. While short of manpower may affect customer delivery.
AI can determine the best times to schedule various members of the team. This can be determined by analysing the history of peak times and other factors. The software can do it at scale, which would be impossible for a human to do in the same time frame.
7. Recruitment
For the company or even for the hiring agencies, finding a suitable talent is a very much cumbersome process. Even in a down economy, finding and hiring talent remains a top priority. In manual search, there are limitations of humans to finding a matching profile with required skills and experience. It's very critical to pick the relevant candidates from hundreds of applications.
With the help of AI, small businesses can cut recruiting costs, improve the candidate experience, and ultimately results in a great hire. Here are some examples:
1. Candidate sourcing tools leverage AI to crawl the internet (social networks, mostly) and find potential candidates that check any number of important boxes related to experience, skills, or otherwise. Working with a bigger pool of options, recruiters can then reach out to these sourced candidates.
2. As the job applications come in, AI can pore through resumes and reference the same criteria used during sourcing to rank or rate the applicants. Being able to start with the most promising candidates can be a major time-saver for recruiters and hiring managers who don’t have time to go through every application themselves.
3. When deciding who to hire, AI can look at performance data, skills assessments, and other datasets from current top performers, then use predictive analytics to tell users which candidate is most like those that have already proven themselves in their organisation.
Use cases
Software and tools with machine learning can look at a lot of facts (customer demographics, product reviews, and sales figures), summarise those facts into concepts and insights, and communicate those insights to the user so that the business owners can do business better.
Machine learning is already in use in some high-profile projects. Here are a few popular examples that we come across many times:
i. Autonomous vehicles (probably the most commonly cited example of ML)
ii. The “did you mean” function when you misspell something in Google
iii. The ranking of “top things to do” in a Google search for a given topic, and
iv. Speech recognition capabilities such as Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, Alexa, etc.
Artificial intelligence is establishing its footprint across the business world. Instead of performing every task manually, companies are now understanding and leveraging the power of technology in automating their systems. As a result, they are achieving greater efficiencies, fewer errors, and ultimately greater profits. I recommend MSME organisations leverage these benefits of technologies to improve profitability and competitiveness.
Darshana Thakkar is MSME Transformation Specialist and Founder, Transformation – The Strategy Hub. An Electrical Engineer followed by MBA – Operations with rich industry experience, Darshana is an expert in transformation, cost reduction, and utilisation of resources. She has invested 25 years in transforming Micro and Small Enterprises. Her rich experience in resolving pain areas and real-life problems of SMEs helps organisations achieve quick results. Her expertise in managing business operations with limited resources helps clients transform their business practices from person driven to system driven with existing resources.
Darshana has helped many organisations to increase profitability and achieve sustainable growth. She is passionate to support the start-up ecosystem of our country. She is associated with CED, Government of Gujarat as a Business Function Expert in the Entrepreneurship Development program, as faculty for industrial subjects in the Second Generation Program (SGP), and as a start-up mentor and member of the start-up selection committee in the CED incubation centre. She is a certified corporate director registered with IICA and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India. Apart from this, she is an author and publishing her blog, article, and case study related to the MSME industry. Email: [email protected]
