By Gunjan Dogra

Artificial intelligence is enabling enterprises to reveal fascinating, previously-hidden insights and to hit bigger targets than ever before.

Today, AI is already an integral part of our everyday lives, and has been a boon to many - if not most - industries. AI technologies have found applications in enhancing not just the business journey, but that of customers as well.

This is because it can accelerate new products for any business by enabling greater analysis of customer demand and purchasing patterns, marketing and advertisement engagement, and the identification of business problems.

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, enables machines to replicate certain human behaviours by providing algorithms with reasoning, prediction, and decisionmaking capabilities. As a result, machines can perform many of the same rote tasks as humans but to a much greater degree of efficacy and efficiency.

So how is AI changing the business landscape?

1. AI augments executive decisionmaking through big data analytics

Decisionmaking is vital to any business, and can make or break revenue generation. However, effective decisionmaking is also a time-consuming, lengthy process. It is worth remembering that humans do not make any decisions in a vacuum. Every day, we use large volumes of whatever data is at our disposal to reach an effective decision. Decisionmaking is not merely guesswork.

With huge investments at stake, one wrong decision could lead to huge losses. Effective decisionmaking requires a holistic understanding of every different factor involved in the decision, meaning huge amounts of data need to be collected and processed - often beyond the capabilities of any individual human.

Artificial intelligence enables businesses to move beyond these limits by processing data at scale, automating its analysis, and breaking it down into actionable insights. Machine learning or deep learning can process both structure and unstructured datasets, analyze all the possibilities, and provide the best results feasible. As a result, more effective and informed decisions can be made by AI - and much more quickly than an individual human ever could.

What's more, the decisionmaking of any AI software depends solely on input data. It's not affected by emotion. The biggest risk lies in hard-coded bias within datasets and 'black box' solutions, which enterprises the world over are thankfully starting to crack.

2) AI offers cross-industry functionality

Thanks to the general functionality that machine learning techniques provide, AI is already serving different functions across nearly every sector, including finance, retail, ecommerce, medical, and research. The latest techniques are also finding use in stock and betting predictions, disease prevention, and business insights.

In financial markets, AI offers a real-time overview of the latest trends and any potential hiccups in market conditions, which helps augment better financial decisionmaking. In ecommerce, product recommendation systems on major retail platforms drives products and services directly to individual consumers, tailored to their previous searches, personal tastes, and demographic. In retail, this extends to tracking consumer behaviour and actionable analysis of consumer buying habits.

3) AI is boosting global enterprises on a mass scale

Walmart - With the aid of product recommendations based on AI solutions, the retail giant claim to have increased sales by up to 63%. Roughly 40 petabytes of data is stored in Walmart's 'Data Cafe', which has also enabled it to optimize its supply chain using predictive analytics.

Salesforce - Salesforce offers a line of tools under the umbrella of Einstein, which can use legacy data to predict and solve business challenges. This AI cloud platform claims to make it much easier to convert leads into sales.

Baidu - This company kicked off trading with shares at $168. Thanks to major advancements in their use of AI, this has now reached $270 - with the expectation that the Chinese retailer will cross $300 imminently.

4) Better customer interaction and understanding

AI helps aid great customer interactions and understanding for business managers. Live chatbots help customers get their queries answered in a timely, automated fashion, taking away the burden from understaffed call centres. AI apps on the market designed to help with scheduling, report making, and predictive advertising to target audiences.

Meanwhile, AI-enabled products power sophisticated demand prediction for products through pattern recognition algorithms, which rigorously study consumers' past behaviour, buying power, as well as wider market trends.

Conclusion: Acquiring the best results with AI

In a nutshell, we can say that AI can play a pivotal role in any business. It can help enterprises grow in many different ways, from predicting market conditions, processing consumer data, to automating customer care and support and supercharging lead generation. AI has provided its effectiveness practically, by acquiring best results within the customer value creation process, information management, data maintenance, and high-quality services.

Gunjan Dogra is a Data Scientist with Webtunix Solutions.