AI exploded into the mainstream a few years ago, and the business world has been forever changed since. If you’re like many business leaders, you may be curious about artificial intelligence’s impact on business in 2024 and how it’s being incorporated into organizations.
The reality is, AI is transforming the way businesses operate. Costs are coming down and efficiency is going up. But how exactly is the technology integrated? And how can you leverage it to grow your business?
While popular brands like Zoom and Microsoft are integrating AI into their platforms, there are countless other AI-enhanced applications available. In this article, we’ll explore some of these tools, how businesses are using AI in 2024, its productivity and cost-saving benefits, and more. Here is what you need to know about AI in 2024.
Artificial Intelligence Impact on Business: How Is AI Being Used in 2024?
If you’re wondering how does AI affect business, then it’s important to look at data. According to a poll by the think tank Bipartisan Policy Center, small businesses are embracing AI. The poll notes that 57% have already integrated it into their operations, and around 3 out of 5 plan to invest in some form of the technology this year. Some of the biggest hurdles to AI adoption are costs (55%), data privacy concerns (52%), uncertainty about the best tools (50%), and employee training costs (46%).
Younger small business owners and executives have the highest rates of AI adoption. The poll shows that 76% of business leaders aged 18-34 and 70% aged 35-44 have a higher usage rate of the technology, compared to 44% of those aged 45-64 and just 33% of those 65 and older.
Not surprisingly, adoption by industry varies. Here’s the approximate AI adoption rate among different industries, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research:
- 12% – Manufacturing and information
- 11% – Healthcare
- 9% – Professional services
- 8% – Education
- 4% – Construction
- 4% – Retail trade
The most common areas where small businesses use AI are accounting and customer management, with 48% of business leaders citing they use the technology for these purposes. Other popular areas of AI use among small businesses include marketing (36%), consumer insights (32%), workforce management (29%), and project management (18%).
3 Types of AI in Common Use Today
While most people know artificial intelligence is a technology that enables machines to mimic human thinking and behavior, you may not know there are different types of AI. Here are three that are increasingly being used in the world today.
- Machine learning: Ever wonder how Netflix or Amazon are able to recommend your perfect next watch or purchase? Machine learning (ML) is behind this amazing technology. ML enables AI to think and learn like a human, becoming smarter and more accurate as it’s fed more data. This is why Netflix gets better at recommending movies for you the more you watch and rate your favorites. ML is used in many industries, including detecting online shopping fraud and even using mammogram images to predict cancer.
- Natural language processing: Like ML, you’ve probably interacted with natural language processing (NLP) countless times without even noticing it. Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all built on NLP. This technology enables AI to comprehend, interpret, and generate human language. It’s what allows chatbots to provide customer service or how Google Translate converts text between languages. You might also interact with NLP when typing an email and Gmail suggests how to finish your sentence.
- Robotics and automation: If you’ve ever used a robot vacuum, then you’ve experienced robotics firsthand. This technology, now often integrated with AI, is primarily designed to automate mundane tasks that we humans would rather not do. Robotics and automation are now widely used across various industries. For example, in some hospitals robots can be seen zooming around to deliver medications or lab samples, while in manufacturing, robotic arms are used on assembly lines to perform tasks like welding, painting, and assembling products.
Popular AI Tools for Business
The artificial intelligence impact on business is undeniable, and these popular tools are making a positive difference for companies.
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft’s most popular AI tool, Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered assistant integrated into your favorite Microsoft 365 apps. What can it do? Copilot has a wide array of applications. For example, within Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, it can generate text, summarize or provide an overview of a document, and transform text into data tables. What’s more, Copilot’s data analysis capabilities are outstanding. The tool can quickly analyze market trends, customer feedback, sales data, and more—saving you countless hours and ultimately helping you make smarter decisions. The result is, your staff works more efficiently while being able to better serve customers and spot emerging opportunities.
Real-World Success Story
Telehealth company Teladoc Health has experienced significant gains in operational efficiency thanks to Microsoft Copilot. It’s helped the company automate routine tasks like answering new employees’ questions, drafting responses to customer inquiries, and proofreading emails. “Copilot saves us thousands of hours as an enterprise just through eliminating daily processes—it’s driving operational efficiency across Teladoc like a personal assistant that never sleeps,” says VP of operations Eddie Swafford.
Zoom, Otter, and Other AI Meeting Tools
Artificial intelligence’s impact on business is transforming the way meetings are conducted. The popular tool Zoom now integrates the technology to automatically summarize meetings and provides a chatbot that helps you catch up if you join late. AI tools like Otter and Clara also bring another level of efficiency in meetings, with Otter automatically transcribing them and Clara handling the scheduling on autopilot.
Real-World Success Story
Zoom’s AI Companion has been a game-changer for the software company Gainsight, significantly reducing their reliance on external AI note-taking apps. This has not only saved the company costs but also mitigated security and privacy concerns related to sensitive information shared during meetings. Thanks to the AI Companion’s meeting summaries and other features, CIO Karl Mosgofian has gained an extra 1.5 hours per week to focus on higher value tasks.
Other Notable AI Tools
Salesforce Einstein
Einstein, the AI tool for the Salesforce CRM platform, can do everything from analyzing data to automating tasks and providing insights. The tool can help you predict leads and sales opportunities, and resolve customer service issues before they arise.
IBM Watson
Einstein, the AI tool for the Salesforce CRM platform, can do everything from analyzing data to automating tasks and providing insights. The tool can help you predict leads and sales opportunities, and resolve customer service issues before they arise.
Google AI
Google AI is Google’s division dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence technology. You’ve likely interacted with its tools without even realizing it—Google Search, Google Translate, and Google Analytics all use AI to deliver accurate results. Business owners can also leverage an AI chatbot within Google ads to create campaigns faster and that perform better.
The Benefits of AI
You’re probably getting a better idea of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and just how helpful AI can be. To take this a step further, let’s look at some specific areas where the technology can benefit almost any business today.
Marketing
Optimize campaigns: AI has made getting the best return on your ad spend easier than ever. By leveraging machine learning and customer data, AI can predict the likelihood of an ad’s conversion, adjust bids, reallocate your budget to the best performing ads, and personalize ad copy to your target audience.
Discover more lucrative audiences: The wealth of customer data available on major ad platforms, like Google and Facebook, is nothing short of amazing. AI can tap into this data—looking at purchase history, browsing behavior, demographics, and more—to identify the audience most likely to be interested in your product.
Sales
Close more sales with smarter lead scoring: Gone are the days of manually reviewing your leads and scoring their likelihood of becoming customers. Today, AI can do this automatically. It can analyze large amounts of data to identify common traits of past converted leads and then pinpoint current leads with similar characteristics, helping your team close more sales.
Forecast sales with precision: AI not only saves time on sales forecasting but also enhances its accuracy. The technology can quickly analyze large amounts of data to spot patterns and trends your staff could easily overlook. With greater accuracy, you’ll be able to better stock inventory to meet customer demand, optimize pricing, and more effectively budget for the future.
Customer Service
Free up employees’ time with virtual assistants: When you think of AI virtual assistants in business, you probably think of chatbots that answer customer queries. While this is indeed one example of AI’s use cases, the technology can also collect customer feedback, route calls, and manage tickets—all with little to no help from an actual staff member. This allows you to save on costs while your employees focus on higher value activities.
Automate customer support: The artificial intelligence impact on business is increasingly apparent in customer support. The technology can now route customer requests to the ideal agent based on language and sentiment, offer suggestions on how to respond to support requests, and summarize tickets so your agents don’t waste time reading through the conversation history. This saves time for your staff and provides quicker responses to customers.
How Different Industries Use AI
AI is no doubt doing some exciting things across many industries. While it’s impossible to mention all the ways artificial intelligence’s impact on business is transforming people and organizations, here are a few notable use cases.
Healthcare
Diagnostics and treatment planning: AI is making remarkable strides in healthcare. The technology can now analyze large amounts of data from patient records and medical images to identify diseases with high accuracy. AI can also predict how a disease will progress and design a unique treatment plan accordingly.
Admin tasks: In the practice setting, AI is benefitting both patients and doctors alike. The use of AI in medical coding is relieving doctors of their admin burden while also helping patients get higher quality, faster care. Physicians can devote more attention to patient needs, make specialist referrals faster, and decrease wait times at the doctor’s office, all while reducing costs in the process.
Manufacturing
Automation and robotics: While robots have been used in the manufacturing industry for decades, the evolution of them in recent times has been nothing short of amazing. Automated vehicles, mechanical arms, and cobots (collaborative robots) can speed up the process of everything from quality control to product assembly, performing these tasks with more precision and accuracy.
Predictive maintenance: You’ve probably had a major breakdown of a car, appliance, or other mechanical item. What if you could avoid these disruptions altogether? That’s exactly what predictive maintenance aims to accomplish in the manufacturing world. Using AI, it anticipates when equipment or machinery will need attention—reducing downtime, cutting costs, and improving safety standards.
Financial Services
Risk management: Risk is ever present in the financial industry. Will a borrower repay a loan? Is a shopper actually a fraudster? AI can help in both scenarios. By analyzing patterns in large amounts of customer and purchasing data and learning from user behavior, AI can identify fraudulent credit cards, devices, and transactions, and even assess a borrower’s credit risk.
Automated trading: While AI has been used in trading since the 80s, the impact of artificial intelligence on business has grown with the increasing sophistication of the technology. As with other use cases in this section, AI’s advantage lies in its ability to analyze large amounts of data and detect patterns. This can allow it to build portfolios, pick stocks, and manage risk with more accuracy than humans. That said, it’s not perfect. AI can make errors and can’t predict black swan events that impact the market, like the recent pandemic or a terrorist attack.
Bias, Breaches, and the Risks of AI in Business
While artificial intelligence’s impact on business is exciting, I do want to pump the brakes a bit. There are some critical ethical and security implications every business should be aware of. To highlight the risks, consider the breaches of Mailchimp and ChatGPT, which both integrate AI and suffered breaches as recently as last year. While a devastating loss of your business data may be unlikely in such an event, sharing sensitive information with any AI tool carries a potential risk of compromise.
What’s more, it’s crucial to remember that while AI can provide shortcuts to complete work faster, relying on it for important business decisions or ideas could have significant implications for your brand.
For example, if an AI tool is used to review applications in your hiring process, it could be looking for patterns of the best candidates in the past 50 years. Given that gender and race equality are more recently gaining focus in hiring practices, your AI tool could easily shortlist predominantly white male candidates, potentially leading to legal issues and accusations of discrimination.
So, if you’re wondering how does AI affect business in terms of bias, it’s vital to understand how your AI tool reaches its conclusions. Business leaders are increasingly making important decisions based on AI-generated results. If the AI is inaccurate or biased, it could lead to regulatory fines, reputational damage, and an erosion of customer trust.
To find out how transparent an AI application is, you can review its terms of service, case studies and customer reviews, documentation on how the tool works, or simply ask customer service representatives.
A New Age of Productivity and Efficiency Is Dawning
By now, you should have a clear understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business. There has been an explosion of new AI tools on the market, and I encourage you to stay open to them—this article has only scratched the surface in terms of what’s out there. The technology can produce levels of efficiency and productivity never before imagined, all while reducing costs.
Interested in integrating a new AI application into your business? Leverage IT can help.
Our IT strategy and consulting service is designed for just this reason. We’ll guide you through every stage of the integration process, from selection to negotiation and implementation. Contact us to discover how you can seamlessly integrate AI into your business.