The Future is Now: 3 Emerging Uses of AI That Will Improve Your Business

Remember when we used to think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) would one day take over the world? Well it is—but not in the apocalyptic sense. Humanity is embracing AI at an exponential pace, using it to solve our everyday problems and menial tasks. Whether it’s through e-commerce, education, navigation, healthcare, gaming or agriculture—chances are you’re already using AI in your daily routine (even if you don’t know it).

According to reports by Servion Global Solutions, by 2025, 95% of customer interactions will be powered by AI[1]—and that’s one of the more obvious business cases. It’s time to start thinking about how AI integration will affect your industry, and how you can use it to your advantage. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the emerging applications of AI that could help improve your business in the not-so-distant future.

Real-time Data Availability

In the digital age, strategic decision-making has to be lightning-fast to produce any kind of significant advantage for your business—especially when coping with rapid market changes and stricter regulations. Luckily, AI tools are being developed which provide improved monitoring and a higher level of analysis, allowing businesses to optimize their strategic movements based on faster, richer and cheaper data than what most human research can produce.

For example, you could use AI to access, process and forecast market prices and other changing data from various sources at a moment’s notice. If your company is heavily dependent on products from industries such as oil and gas or banking, which often see large fluctuations, it stands to benefit greatly from AI-generated predictions of crucial price changes or market shifts.

Improved Learning and Better Predictions

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have increasing opportunities to adopt AI to make better financial predictions and analysis using advanced machine learning. These tools can provide predictive financial data in areas such as cash-flow forecasting, revenue forecasting, cost and expense planning, and balance-sheet planning, thus removing any human bias or error in decision-making.

Monitoring with AI will be invaluable for many of your business processes, including:

• quickly detecting “fat finger” financial errors so they can be corrected before other systems are affected;
• issuing alerts for unusual patterns in your business’s finances or operations; and,
• automating the transfer of data from email to customer files, updating them with address changes or addition of new services

Worry-free Account Management

Most conventional financial management software works on matching incoming payments to outstanding accounts receivables—provided the payment amount matches the invoice. Incomplete remittance data, semi-partial payments and payment of multiple invoices on a single remittance can all cause errors/discrepancies that take time and effort to resolve.

By embedding AI technologies in your account reconciliation processes, the AI can model combinations of payments and invoices in different situations to find the most accurate matches, regardless of whether the payments and outstanding amounts are a perfect fit. This can drastically reduce the frequency of errors and discrepancies in your reconciliation, and increase your overall efficiency.  

While many of these technologies are still in development, in the near future they’ll be available to any organization, no matter the size. With the help of AI, you’ll be able to make sound decisions for your business with the confidence that comes from knowing that you’re backed by incredibly accurate—and frankly, superhuman—data and analysis.

To quote former executive chairman, president and CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty: “Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.”

Article written by Abhishek Mishra

[1] https://servion.com/blog/what-emerging-technologies-future-customer-experience/