4 Ways AI Can Improve Remote Business during a Pandemic
The sudden outbreak of coronavirus has taken the world by a storm, effecting people physically, emotionally, and financially. The businesses around the world have been affected profoundly, and the world economy has seen a new hit.
The virus broke in early 2020, and although it hasn’t been eradicated, most parts of the world are now beginning to get back to normal (or should we call it the new normal) with precautions and preventive measures. In this state of affairs, most people are trying to get their work done from home.
The world now knows that until a vaccine comes to our rescue, the only way to control the virus is through social distancing. Therefore, organizations have established new policies to keep the employees safe, and AI is playing a major role in implementing these policies. AI is helping businesses during the pandemic as business owners can manage the supply chain, sort documents, and even provide medical facilities using AI.
Stats and Figures
Over the past few years, AI has drastically improved the way businesses operate, giving humans a break from all the redundant work. Businesses are wanting to include AI in their systems for ease and efficiency. Let’s have a look at a few stats:
- As per Gartner’s survey, more than 37% of the organizations are using AI in some form
- 40% of marketing and sales departments encourage the use of AI
- The demand for AI has increased twice in the last two years
- While communicating with a business, 63% of people prefer to talk to a bot
- 84% of businesses believe that AI will provide them a competitive advantage
- According to Forrester, 9% of new U.S. jobs by 2025 would be created because of AI and automation
- 51% of businesses are using AI to enhance their product
How Can AI Help During a Pandemic?
Now that we are in the middle of a pandemic, businesses that are working remotely can also take advantage of AI. There are several ways people are already using AI assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant; Google maps to calculate best routes, Alexa from Amazon, etc.
Let’s have a look at how is it beneficial for remote businesses to include AI in their operations:
1. Identify the Area of Demand for Supply Chain
Businesses need to determine the need for a product in the market and also the emerging trends. Matching supply and demand are a crucial task for every business; however, we live in a data-driven world – a massive amount of data accumulates each day as consumers use the internet to browse, shop, and interact.
AI helps in analyzing this data to drive consumer trends – it determines increasing or decreasing consumer needs, changes in consumer shopping patterns, changes in the demand for products and services, and the effect of a pandemic on consumer buying power, among other things. Therefore, based on the data present in real-time, AI can help you examine the emerging and dynamic trends to identify the need of the market during the pandemic.
2. Automation
More than anything else, AI helps you save time, which means saving costs and using resources for other important tasks. You can automate your repetitive processes using AI, such as back-office tasks. Automation not only helps you save time, but it also relieves you from thinking of half of the things that you used to do manually, such as refunds, replying to people’s queries, canceling orders, issuing refunds, and sending confirmations, etc.
Moreover, AI bots are much smarter than humans and work on tasks better than humans as they don’t need to rest. The chances of errors by bots are also very low as compared to humans. They can perform the tasks at a much faster rate than humans. If a task ever becomes hard for the AI assistant, it will prompt you to look into the matter, which is how it helps you save time and only look into tasks when there is an issue that the cognitive AI assistant cannot solve.
3. Identification and Verification
It is important in several matters to verify identities in business; however, AI has got you covered for that matter. AI is widely used for verification and identification of humans, documents, and other important data that is frequently used in your business. AI has swiftly replaced the human checkers for identification purposes, so if you are hiring a new employee or need to get anyone identified, AI can help you do that without a hassle.
You can also check and verify documents and their authenticity via AI checkers. Checking the legitimacy of images, text, official documents, etc. is now a matter of seconds with AI. However, the quality of Coaxial Cables used in the transmission of internet signals is important for AI to work seamlessly for you at home. Make sure you have a good internet facility for a business to run from home.
4. Medical
With the pandemic, health systems around the globe were under a lot of additional stress, and it was becoming impossible for healthcare staff to look for patients other than COVID-19 patients. Luckily, several medical platforms have now included AI, which is how the stress from physicians and doctors has decreased.
You can get yourself tested and checked with AI bots who are verified and clinically tested. This is how you can get medical support and avoid contracting the virus. With this advancement in technology, healthcare has drastically improved, and health care professionals have time to focus on other critical cases.
To Sum it Up
There are several ways in which AI technology has been integrated into everyday business operations – AI has sped up the processes and allows humans to focus on other, more critical aspects. Automation of processes has led ease in execution of operations in every field, including business, traveling, medical, supply chain, etc.
The inclusion of AI in businesses is helping them grow and expand rapidly as the resources that used to work manually on tasks are now free to focus on strategizing and planning other aspects of a business. Even if you are a small business owner, AI is essential for you to make an efficient workflow system. You can save a lot of hassle, time, and money by including the technology in your remote small businesses.
