Boosting Startups with Artificial Intelligence

In the previous chapter, we have covered large enterprises venturing into AI, now it’s time for startups and freelancers who want to use AI in their daily work. The main difference will be the flexibility and scale of operations. As a startup, you’re able to operate much faster, making adjustments on the fly. Of course, the more people you have onboard and more decision-makers to agree with, the longer it will take, but generally, startups can deploy AI pretty fast (or any new solution). However, what they mostly lack is capital and data at scale, which more mature organisations have.

Use AI to improve customer experience

Customer service is one of the critical components of successful businesses. “More companies are realizing that delivering great care is not just the right thing to do; it also makes great business sense. Seven in 10 U.S. consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service,” said Raymond Joabar, Executive Vice President of American Express’ servicing organization. “Service is an increasingly important competitive advantage for companies, both large and small, that make doing business easy and put their customers’ needs first.”12

AI-powered tools can help you boost your customer service in many ways. Chatbots handle more and more customer support communications. Chatbots are a versatile approach to customer queries, offering a quick response 24/7. Not only you can make your customer service way better and frictionless, but thanks to chatbots running 24/7 you’ll be able to collect data about:

• customer preferences,
• customer demographics for further analysis,
• common customer issues.

Having a chatbot is often just a cost of a couple of days and a couple hundreds dollars to start with a pre-build solution by one of the chatbot providers. Chatfuel is a great example. They allow you to quickly connect a bot to Facebook Messenger and run the very first bot within minutes of using their service.

Chatbots can be used to help you sell more, for example, by offering discount codes and mentioning products interesting to your potential customer. There is great example of restaurant chains running chatbots which would take orders on Messenger. Fancy a pizza? Just type to get it.

Make data-driven decisions fueled by AI

Analysing data is crucial for any business, and with AI you can do that much better and much faster. You can get insights into customer behavior and real-time information about market trends to make the proper decision.

Depending on your particular market, product, or service you provide, you might use data gathered via Crunchbase or BuzzSumo to track the flow of information, see how your competitors are doing, what is trending and adjust your decisions based on that.

If you’re further along the way and have genuine, unique data about your customers, then it’s time to start implementing off the shelf AI solutions for customer segmentation and prediction of growth/demand.

We’re living in an unprecedented age of data when often it’s just a matter of giving a process a proper framework in order to solve it by looking at the data. There are many data collecting solutions available on the market which you can use to enhance your own data. Data gathering and data cleaning is the most crucial task before approaching any machine learning solution, and it will allow you to use AI to your benefit.

You can enhance your data by:

• running a CRM powered by AI;
• have a unified framework for documents, customer data, sales, and any piece of information which your business is generating;
• running crawlers to scrape the web in search of data useful from your business perspective;
• buy data through commercial platforms;
• analyse social media data like Twitter;
• track applications and hiring process.

You shouldn’t just rely on static reports and websites and be proactive when it comes to data. Current economy rewards knowledge and actionable insights from most recent data, especially when it comes to:

• how to approach your customers,
• what your customers like and dislike,
• what are general trends in your market.

Understanding trends will allow you to develop new products and services, as well as adjust existing ones. By understanding potential employees, you’ll be better at scaling your organisation. We’ve never had such access to knowledge on the spot, live, 24/7.

For example, Coca-Cola has launched a new flavor, Cherry Sprite, based on the data they had collected and analysed using AI.13

You don’t have to be a data scientist to understand data or use AI. There are many solutions for decision-makers, marketers, business officers, salespeople, and this list goes on. AI is penetrating every niche of every business, and it’s worth searching on the web what’s currently available. I won’t list any solutions here as the chance is that by the moment this book is out, there will already be something new and better. That’s how fast AI solutions are being built right now.

So have a look yourself, do a small search looking for AI-powered tools to boost your:

• effectiveness (CRMs, databases, calendars, AI assistants),
• sales and marketing (customer data analysis).

That’s a start for looking further into AI, especially when it comes to forecasting. Forecasting means predicting the future through data analysis. Whether you want to project future sales or estimate market trends, AI can help you efficiently make the forecast, from supply chain optimization to marketing spend.

In order to truly use the power of forecasting, you need at least thousands of entry data points to be able to use regression and other algorithms for meaningful prediction. Machine learning solutions, deep learning especially, need even more data to take off the ground, and often those kinds of solutions are custom made to your specific needs. You can either hire data scientists or seek external help by hiring software houses specializing in machine learning.

Automate your marketing efforts with AI

Using AI tools to boost your marketing is another great idea for how you can grow your company. Currently, there are dozens of products on the market that will allow you to manage ad campaigns, automate email marketing (rasa.io, Mailchimp), or help you with content generation.

Tools like Curata use AI to help marketers find an interesting perspective on a piece of news and show its relevance to your company. The more content you can produce, the better outreach you will have, and that’s vital for the growth of any startup.

Buying into AI tools and taking time to learn them is important if you want to be a cutting edge company. As a startup, you don’t have to fight with legacy software. You can often start from scratch with a new idea, implement it, and see how it works. This is the most significant competitive advantage you have over larger organisations. Use it to your benefit by regularly learning about the new tools you can use in your business.

You can use programmatic advertising to reach a broader audience base and improve overall marketing results. Then you can use AI tools, like Albert AI, to manage your digital ad campaigns:

• media buying,
• audience segment creation,
• cross-channel execution,
• testing, optimization, and analysis.

AI can also help you personalise your message. This is how rasa.io is working, trying to understand what your email newsletter subscribers click on, and what doesn’t perform that well. It then gets better with time, proposing to users the content that is interesting to them from the sources of your choice. You end up with a more loyal user base.

Improve your hiring process

Building a strong team is crucial to the success of any business. AI can help with automating talent acquisition workflow, for example, by sifting through candidates and pre-choosing those best fit for a job. If well trained, AI can indicate which candidates have the highest chance of fitting into your culture and bringing necessary skills on board.

Tools like PredictiveHire can help you quickly evaluate a large number of applications and narrow down the list to those best suited for the job.

Another option is creating a survey for your candidates to measure their expectations against yours. AI can quickly categorize applicants and split them into groups based on their answers, thus saving you a lot of time.

Startups powered by AI

As a startup, you have a great opportunity to deploy cutting edge AI solutions and unlock the tremendous growth of your business. So make sure you:

• deploy a chatbot to boost your customer service,
• use business analytics tools to make data-driven decisions,
• optimize your marketing campaigns and ad spend using AI tools,
• write down your most repetitive and tedious processes and let AI do it.

All of these tools are easy to implement and start using. If you have ever used a Facebook Pixel for your website, then the idea here is similar - you want to gather as much information as possible about your daily business and analyse it. Facebook Pixel and Facebook tools allow you to optimize your ad spend on Facebook platform, but if you want to advertise on other platforms, you have to implement other tools. Especially if you’re going to analyse data across multiple channels and verticals, just think about:

• ad spend vs sales,
• email newsletter subscribers vs sales,
• invoice analysis,
• customer segmentation based on messages, sales, and profiles,
• business processes divided into time/action framework and analysed.

Options here are endless and will depend on your particular business offer and modus operandi. It’s important that you keep track of your data from the early days. As a startup, you need to act quickly to achieve top performance and be able to compete with established players in your field.

AI won’t solve all your problems, but it will allow you to boost your business to new heights. Making data-driven decisions and automating certain processes will make you quick and efficient. Go for it!

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