AI Primer: How Smart Technology Makes Businesses Better

Sudipto Ghosh

January 26, 2018

Smart Technology Are Part of AI Landscape That Runs on Purpose-Built Software to Manage Data Effectively and with Accuracy

By 2018, 62% of companies all over the world will be using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve yield and operations of their business. However, less than half of businesses currently understand exactly how AI can directly benefit them.

As it happens, many of you are already using AI, though you may not realize it. Whether you are using Facebook to manage your business’ social media page, or Sage’s chatbot, Pegg, to track your accounts and finances, AI is closer than you think.

What is AI?

AI isn’t as intelligent as the name suggests¹. “Smart technology” actually refers to purpose-built software that is capable of making sense of huge quantities of data very quickly.

It needs instructions, it needs integration, and it needs specific criteria to organize information, but once it has those, it can reduce a job that might take an employee hours or days to mere minutes.

Recruitment Made Easy Using Smart Technology

We know you don’t like having to trawl through hundreds of CVs in an effort to find the right candidate for your open position. Nobody does. Now, with the rise of social media websites, there are more places than ever to find that person with the ideal skill-set.

Fortunately, purpose-designed AI software is capable of rapidly organizing thousands of social media profiles or digital CVs for your required skillsets. It can take a matter of seconds to narrow down hundreds of CVs to the few candidates that you will want to interview.

Talk Like a Robot Smart Technology

Have you ever visited a website and used the 24/7 chat support only to realize you are speaking with a computer? These are chatbots.

Chatbots are a great way to reduce the time your actual employees spend directly interacting with customers. Instead, the AI handles first-line support by identifying keywords in the customers’ questions and searching a database of responses to provide a suitable answer.

Smart Technology to Learn What Your Customers Really Want

For those of you using Facebook to advertise and promote your business, you may already be aware of its free AI software, Insights. This “clever” algorithm tracks activity on your page and posts, including how many people are sharing it and who is engaging with your page.

Insights allow businesses to quickly get a sense of which demographics are interested their products and services. This data can then be used to better target advertising and marketing to improve sales and services.

Multinational and finance companies deal with more data than anyone, and they use similar algorithms and smart software to analyze multiple thousands of data streams in a matter of seconds, spitting out easy-to-read graphs and even “suggestions” for optimized business strategies.

AI Smart Technology for Physical Hardware

It can be tempting to think that AI can only make sense of electronic data; it is software, after all. However, as companies using physical machinery take steps to safeguard their investments with sensors and detectors, smart technologies can now be used to integrate and manipulate this data, too.

Integrated AI is now capable of automating maintenance schedules for individual machine parts, making real-time risk assessments, and even stopping individual machines to avoid workplace accidents.

Businesses don’t need to worry about AI taking over control of their operations – not yet, anyway. Instead, you only need to think about what data would make your tasks easier, and how to integrate the technology with existing infrastructure. Afterwards, the AI will take care of the task assigned, leaving you to get on with more interesting opportunities.

Recommended Read: Is AI-Enabled ‘Marketing to Things’ the Future?

¹Editor’s Note: [The post was jointly prepared with, and includes critical insights from SAGE]