AI has been around since the 1950s but only recently has become mainstream. Today, AI is being used in everything from self-driving cars to smart homes. However, there are still many misconceptions surrounding AI. Many believe that AI is just another buzzword that means nothing. Others think that AI is going to take over our jobs or that AI will replace humans altogether.
In reality, AI is already here. We use it every day. For instance, we use AI to recognize faces, translate languages, play games, and even write news articles. However, AI isn’t limited to those applications. There are hundreds of thousands of apps available today that leverage AI technology.
Why should you care about AI? AI is making human life easier. AI is helping us do things faster, smarter, and cheaper. AI is changing the way we work.
The Importance of AI in Strategic Planning
In order to succeed in any industry, organisations must constantly innovate. To do this, they need to keep up with changes in technology and consumer behaviour. For example, if a company doesn’t adapt quickly enough, it could lose market share to competitors who are able to react faster.
To remain competitive, companies must continually develop new strategies and tactics. However, developing a strategy requires time and resources. Companies may not always have the luxury of having all the necessary data to create a comprehensive strategic plan. That’s where artificial intelligence comes into play.
How AI Can Help You Build Better Strategies
AI makes planning easier
Planning is one of the most important aspects of any business. Whether you’re running a single store or a multinational corporation, having a plan is critical to success. Planning allows you to set goals, track progress towards those goals, and adjust plans if necessary. Still, it isn’t always a walk in the park. Planning takes time, effort, and resources. With AI, you no longer need to plan manually. AI can automate tasks such as data collection, analysis, and reporting. As a result, you save time and increase efficiency.
In recent years, AI has made planning easier. With AI, you can automate many processes and free up time to focus on other areas of your business. For example, you could use AI to automatically generate sales forecasts, schedule meetings, or even handle customer support requests. For example, if you’re running a retail store, you might want to know who your best customers are. By using AI, you could set up a system that automatically collects data from your point-of-sale systems.
AI helps you make better and faster decisions
Decision-making is another area where AI excels. When faced with complex problems, humans tend to rely heavily on intuition. Intuition is great for some things, but it doesn’t always work out.
When it comes to decision-making, AI can help you make better choices. For example, an insurance company specialising in property and casualty insurance would likely operate in a very competitive market. The pricing strategy of competitors can greatly impact their own revenue. Sometimes, they undercharge on their policy and other times, they overcharge. With customers shopping around before renewing their insurance policy, it’s easy to lose out to competitors. However, implementing AI into the business to automatically observe their competitors’ pricing can help them make better data-driven decisions for their pricing without spending great amounts of time manually finding this information.
AI Improves customer service
Customer service is hard enough without having to deal with irate phone calls and emails. Fortunately, customer service is another area where AI shines. Today, companies offer online chat, phone calls, and emails to customers who have questions or concerns. Unfortunately, these methods aren’t very effective. They require employees to manually respond to messages, which means they can’t do much else while waiting for a response.
An AI system wouldn’t suffer from this problem. For example, you could create chatbots that answer questions quickly and efficiently. These bots could be programmed to respond to common inquiries, such as “What size shirt do I need?” or “Can you ship my package tomorrow?”. The AI can assign more complex problems to agents.
AI increases productivity
Productivity is another area where AI can save you time and money. A study by Accenture found that using AI to automate repetitive tasks increased employee efficiency by 40%. This AI automation can be used throughout various departments of a business such as human resources, IT, sales, and customer service.
Imagine you manage a team of 10 people. Each day, you ask them to complete 20 tasks. After doing so, you realise that none of the tasks took longer than 30 minutes each but took up a lot of valuable time altogether. You could hire additional staff to speed up the process, but that would come at a high price. Instead, you could train an AI system to do the same tasks. Once trained, the AI system could run itself 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
AI reduces costs
Cost reduction is always a good thing. When it comes to reducing costs, AI can help you in multiple ways. As mentioned earlier, AI assists in better decision-making, meaning it will find money-saving options and lessen your chances of making poor decisions that will affect your revenue.
It can also cut back on labour expenses. For example, you might hire an AI assistant to perform routine tasks such as scheduling meetings, sending out invoices, and tracking inventory levels. Once your AI assistant learns how to complete these tasks, you won’t need to hire additional employees.
AI Applications in Strategic Plans
Companies use AI to automate processes, analyse data, predict trends, and even build models. These applications allow companies to gain insights that would otherwise take months or years to gather.
For example, an eCommerce company uses AI to predict when customers would buy certain items. They found that customers were more likely to buy these types of items during specific times of the day. Based on this insight, the company was able to optimise inventory levels and reduce costs. Banks use AI to detect fraud in credit card transactions. By analysing transaction patterns, the company can spot unusual activity and prevent fraudulent charges before they happen.
AI has become a critical component of strategic planning, and it will continue to play a role in shaping how we run businesses in the future. As AI becomes more pervasive, it will change the way we work.
Artificial intelligence is already transforming industries across the globe. Soon, it will transform yours.
