3 Ways AI Can Automate and Scale Your Business in 2021

Every business is looking for an edge to scale their business, learn how AI can automate and scale your business with less expense.

Artificial intelligence is ushering in the next wave of business automation. If you’re not employing it to automate your processes, you’re falling behind.

Do you find yourself wasting time on recurring, repetitive tasks?

That email follow-up you just sent today. Or updating your social media pages and monitoring how many people are visiting your website.

Imagine how much more productive you would be if you could automate your marketing efforts with outreach tools, or let someone (or something) else do all those repetitive tasks for you.

There’s a reason why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing at a rapid rate. From productivity gains that lead to increased profits to freeing up time so you can devote more attention to strategic initiatives – there is no shortage of how your business can benefit from automating your workflow and processes with AI.

Source: Oberlo.com

That is why in this article, I’ll cover the 3 key ways on how you can start automating your processes to scale your business efforts in 2021.

1. Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the most popular ways that businesses automate their processes, and it’s not hard to see why.

With the use of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), AI chatbots can learn how to respond more naturally, accurately, and efficiently, which means more time and money back in your pocket.

However, just like you wouldn’t hire someone without going through a rigorous interview process or start an app without vetting your app developer, the same can be said for chatbots.

It is imperative that you define your goals in order to find the right platform for your needs. There are many great chatbots in the market, and you don’t have to be a tech-wizard to set one up. There are platforms ranging from low-code no-code to open source platforms, and even industry-specific ones.

Here are some of the ways various industries are automating their processes using chatbots:

• Retail: Chatbots are used to simplify shopping on the customer end by taking orders, searching for inventory, and providing product recommendations. You can also use chatbots to provide support and FAQs that answer a wide range of repetitive questions.
• Banking and Finance: Chatbots are used to answer a wide range of questions, including how customers use their financial accounts or how much they owe on credit cards. You can also automate notifications that are sent out when certain events happen such as balances going below a threshold amount or upcoming payment dates.
• Healthcare: Chatbots can be used to help in diagnosis and provide patient information and treatments for better engagement.
• Education: Chatbots are being used in classrooms to provide students with an alternate way of asking questions or getting help from their teachers and classmates without having to raise their hands. This new technology is also helping improve how well kids do when taking online tests by providing them in-depth feedback as opposed to just telling them whether it was right or wrong.
• Insurance: Chatbots are used to handle routine questions such as quotes and coverage information.

2. Emails

Emails are one of the most important tools for any business and how you use it can be the difference between a successful outreach campaign or a failed one. 

With AI, you can now personalize your emails based on how the recipient opens and responds to various messages. This is achieved via a learning algorithm that improves how it analyses with every interaction.

Just like chatbots, AI-driven email software has evolved into a suite of tools that can be used for various functions including automation, response suggestions, and personalized human contact.

Here are some of the ways AI automation tools are changing the ways businesses do email:

• Scheduling Emails: You are able to schedule emails to be sent in advance so that they go out at the time that best aligns with your strategic efforts. Not only that, but follow-up emails after a certain interval or condition can also be automated.
• Writing Emails: You can use writing software powered by AI to craft email content templates. Long gone are the days where personalized emails are time-consuming – customization and personalization can now be done at scale.
• Organizing Emails: You can even use AI to automate your email inbox so that messages are automatically sorted by sender, time, or even priority level. When things are sorted in a certain way, your processes can be much more efficient.

3. Social Media

We all know that Social media has become an integral part of how businesses reach and interact with their target audience. When done right, social media can be the key component to your business sales funnel. 

But with how quickly social media evolves, it can be a challenge to scale your efforts and still maintain quality content. That is where AI can help automate processes that would otherwise be a time-consuming manual process, without compromising on quality.

It is also how you can build a loyal following of followers that will eventually become your customer base.

We’ve seen how the social media landscape has been changed by AI, and it’s only going to continue increasing in importance as the years go on. 

Here are some ways your business can leverage AI for your social media efforts:

• Content Scheduling: Just like email scheduling, there are AI tools that can help you schedule content so that it’s posted at the best possible time for your target audience.
• Content publishing: There are tools that can also post your scheduled content directly to all of your different social media platforms.
• Content analysis: Social media platforms are now using AI algorithms to analyze how users react to content.  This feedback can be used to better understand your audience and how you should create your content in the future.
• Social Listening: Social media listening (the act of how social interactions are monitored and analyzed) has been made easier with AI. There are tools that analyze trending topics and what the sentiment around them are. This will help businesses understand how they should respond, how they should be targeting their audience, and how to best communicate with this group.

The Bottom Line

Artificial intelligence is ushering in the next wave of business automation.

No longer constrained to large corporations with deep pockets, AI enables all businesses to automate and scale their operations by handling repetitive tasks such as email marketing and social media engagement, and also providing deeper analytics at scale.

This new technology is not only improving how your business does things now but it’s also helping you prepare a better system of operation for the future.

So, how are you future-proofing your business to scale?