By Vitalii Chukhlantcev
Since the release of Chat GPT 3.5, the global internet searches with the keyword “AI” have been steadily increasing MoM, according to publicly available Google Trends data. Over the same period, the number of SP500 companies that cite “AI” in their earning reports has almost quadrupled. This list includes: real estate, energy, finance, production, and health US companies, all of whom at least acknowledge the notion of AI.
But is AI really that useful to any given business as of Autumn 2024, and which specific AI applications should businesses in 2024 prioritise to get positive ROI? After fuelling the growth of a unicorn machine learning (subcategory of AI) start-up and reviewing all the state-of-the-art AI models, I think there are 3 main fields where AI should be applied, which guarantees the positive impact on ROI. I will discuss them further.
1. Business analysis like never before
It’s not like prior to 2022 we have been living in a world that lacks data, but the capabilities that the current models enable are unseen and significant for understanding your product, your business, and your customer.
No matter if your data is in the format of audio, text, or video. Today, you can feed as many as 1.4 million words; 22 hours of audio or 2 hours of high-quality video in 1 go to one of the frontier AI models, which will analyse all this data within minutes. For a small to medium-sized business, AI can generate a daily summary of all your business operations, including every single text message and voice call recorded in your CRM. This way, you can get key takeaways for the status of your key clients, catch legal concerns early, and review customer feedback after a change in your sales policy.
Notably, you don’t have to analyse all data in one go; most frontier models are able to work with text, audio, and images, and even if they have a short context window (ie can’t analyse a tonne of data in one go), you can always explore your data bit by bit (you need to write a bit of code).
If you are a factory, you can ask AI for quality assurance by auto-sending it a picture of every single finished product, something that required custom ML algorithms & specialist integration just a few years ago.
If you are involved in creative production, you can now analyse all your 10,000 previous ads and tag them to know which one had which CTA, which colours were used, what kind of character, how was the audio quality, and anything else that you might care about. Match this data with the performance of the respective ads, and you have created a whole new dimension to your optimisation strategy.
AI enables innovative data generation where it was not cost-effective previously, and making good use of this will undoubtedly give a competitive advantage to those who capture the trend.
2. Searching internal and external sources fast
The headline here is simply referring to the new era of search. Research is integral to informed decision-making in business. There are numerous tools on the market that help your employees search through the company’s knowledge and links to reduce the amount of back and forth between colleagues. Alongside this, today, you can ask for economics, media trends, or other concurrent information via a specific multi-step question, and you will get a direct answer with sources.
Internally, the AI fuelled search is great because it enables to:
1. Find readily available answers for company related questions, e.g. which API documentation to use for integrating S2S data for an X customer.
2. Connecting the query to topic experts. As we all know, AI is imperfect, and all the relevant data may not be generally available in your company. However, by finding peers that commonly write about a topic, it can direct you to the right person fast.
Externally, AI with access to all the latest news, fresh internet data sources, and social media (i.e., Reddit) enables quick answers to seemingly complex questions:
- As a business owner looking to expand into new markets, you can ask AI to give context about the metrics that matter in the specific geographical area you are researching. You can even ask to search and summarise sources in the relevant language, e.g., Spanish sources summarised in English; this enables you to get better locally sourced data in seconds.
- As an employee, just before an important meeting, you could ask a weirdly specific question and again, get a summary alongside sources to understand a concept that you have not come across before. Something that would usually take at least ten Google minutes.
Overall, the technology massively speeds up information gathering and analysis and breaks the notion of a language barrier. This makes for a widely applicable tool.
3. Filling in the gaps for your media posts with no effort
Everyone needs digital marketing and media presence. If you are a small to medium business, you probably don’t have that much budget to utilise for it. This is where AI comes in handy. Do not be fooled; it cannot yet design a whole brandbook for you, but it surely helps to fill in the gaps when you know what content your media requires.
- Creating a custom audio for your ad which does not require huge payments
- Generating a relevant image in any style that you can add to your content for free
- Designing a simple logo for your online business
- Translate your videos without losing the intonations or audio quality
All of those things took hours just a few years ago, but now it is done and edited in minutes. You just need to know what and how to ask while paying a minimal fee.
Conclusion
The above is a non-exhaustive list of AI applications that will be genuinely useful for most businesses today. The key benefit of already getting familiar with them is to get ahead of the curve. As the AI develops further, the mentioned capabilities will grow wider and stronger hence integrating them into your startup or company at this stage is both cost-efficient and futureproofing.
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