With AI at our fingertips and constantly evolving, so are the opportunities that it can offer business leaders who are pursuing growth and sustainability. AI is an enabler and an invaluable resource for building business stability to withstand the challenges of unpredictable markets.
There are hurdles to overcome, particularly for SMEs operating on a smaller budget with a leaner workforce, but it is these organisations that stand to benefit the most from leveraging AI. Fortunately, there are avenues to adoption for all businesses.
AI as an enabler
Whether a business is selling goods or services, intermittent, unpredictable demand is one of the greatest challenges and particularly so for SMEs. Ripples in a shallow pond are more likely to expose the bottom, and SMEs often lack the depth needed for absorbing significant fluctuations in demand in the same way that larger organisations can. Therefore, being able to predict what the demand will be at any given time has the potential to mean the difference between business growth and insolvency.
Where stock is part of the business model, efficient stock management is crucial and for smaller businesses margins are narrower. Overstocking uses up valuable space and cash, and where goods are perishable or time sensitive, this can lead to high volumes of waste. On the flipside, running out of inventory will lead to lost business and risks damaging customer loyalty.
To make demand forecasts, even with a relatively small number of products, the volume of data points and calculations to make reasonably accurate predictions soon add up, making this process complex and almost impossible to do manually. This is where AI-driven data analysis can dramatically streamline business operations.
So long as the data captured is high quality, AI can be used to analyse great volumes of existing sales data to forecast with accuracy what demand is likely to be and thereby enable the business to make their operation much more efficient. This approach will also boost an organisation’s sustainability credentials by reducing unnecessary or half-filled lorry loads and the volume of waste produced.
Alongside more complex AI forecasting models, this technology also offers businesses a raft of tools that can be leveraged to speed up processes and make operations more efficient. It is not a case of AI replacing jobs but by adopting AI, teams and individuals can refine how they operate to be more efficient and, with time freed up, develop their function in a way that may not have been possible before. In smaller organisations with less manpower, this is especially beneficial.
Where are the roadblocks?
The key barriers for smaller businesses wishing to adopt AI can be lack of time, funds and necessary skills. In these operations, the norm tends to be ‘all hands on deck’, which does not leave much time for exploring and testing AI use cases or learning or investing in the necessary skills.
Nonetheless, new AI-driven tools and resources are constantly being released. For example, AI-powered tools on video calls can instantly produce a range of documents following a meeting, such as the minutes, an action list or even follow up emails ready to review and send. Many of these offer certain functions for free or are inexpensive, so cost is not necessarily a barrier, except when it comes to larger-scale innovations.
Platforms like Perplexity AI can support research; Zapier and Taskade are organisational tools that support streamlined workflows and collaborative work within teams; a myriad of other AI-powered tools can offer support in content creation and even help with branding, creating adverts and imagery. Naturally, some tools are better than others and human oversight is essential, but a small team can diversify itself in a multitude of ways to improve outputs by using AI.
For more complex tasks like forecasting, more time and funding are needed but even for these, there are avenues available, particularly as the government seeks to grow the UK’s AI market. For example, Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) schemes, which are part funded by Innovate UK and supported by expertise from a partner university. These initiatives are aimed at bringing together forward-thinking businesses and expert academics to tackle strategic innovation challenges, such as developing forecasting models. Funding of more than £250,000 is available for individual projects through such schemes.
The BridgeAI scheme is another potential route to funding. Progressive small business leaders would be well advised to explore opportunities to access the funding, support and specialist expertise they need to bring AI inhouse.
Engage your people
Whilst researching what tools and resources are out there requires a time investment virtually every business can benefit from AI in some way, however it is vital to have employees on board. The narrative of ‘AI is taking our jobs’ can be avoided where its adoption is carefully managed.
An effective way for business leaders to explore the opportunities of AI and support engagement, is by tasking teams and individuals to develop use cases of how AI could make their function more efficient, and what this greater efficiency would enable the team to achieve. Noone knows better how a department could be improved than the people working within it every day.
This approach will get everyone looking for the opportunities and, where they are greenlit, feel invested in implementing them. As with any change in business, it is important to walk before running. Any AI use cases need to be carefully analysed and tested before being implemented and started small before scaling.
