AI technologies are engineered to advance small enterprises with large visions. Yet, with the whole National Small Business Week of 2024 being on day 2, the issues of implementing new-generation innovations are on the lips of most of the 33 million small businesses in America. That is because being more competitive, running a more efficient business, and making better managerial decisions are the problems entrepreneurs face daily.
AI tools driving SME growth
AI tools are still fresh; their promises and the range of their applicability are virtually limitless for most companies that have not utilized all the possibilities the technology can offer their business. However, the small business sector itself is rather diverse. It has disappointed many support channels for hiring, lending, and others who might like to provide aid to all these valuable units of the domestic economy. While this multi-purpose nature is also the strength of AI, it can work when others don’t, and it can also be a drawback when the environment is not advantageous.
AI boosts customer experience by creating an effortless shopping experience, improving the productivity and efficiency of employees, increasing data intelligence real-time analysis, democratizing access to working capital, and jumpstarting the marketing and content creation process are only a few bright prospects for small business’s growth in the AI age. As artificial intelligence (AI) technology continues to make its presence felt, the world’s biggest names in AI, namely Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI, have identified enterprise customers as their main targets for their products. However, they are also introducing AI solutions targeted towards small firms.
Microsoft unleashed the smallest models in its AI aimed at companies with less capital. “Small language models will have smaller probabilities to generate hallucinations, work with less data and minimal preprocessing steps, and, in the end, they are easier to work with legacy systems in an enterprise that is not much updated,” according to Narayana Pappu, CEO at Zendata. This situation is confirmed by the fact that most companies are generally unwilling to give away their 90% data and don’t have enough resources to learn how to make large language models either.
Leveraging AI for smarter operations
AI solutions for small businesses allow them to automate repetitive customer service functions, such as following up on customer service requests and cleaning up data. As time spent on routine tasks is reduced, employees can focus on more complex activities.
This tech giant is devoted to making business tasks more interactive on Google’s side. That is to say, Google has a well-known product suite that is robust and cloud-based. It also offers artificial intelligence (AI), announced on April 9, where AI was employed as a means of business strategy and workflow.
Additionally, Google-owned innovative product Gemini noted that “70% of business users who use ‘Write my essay’ in Docs or Gmail implement suggestions, and more than 75% of users who make images in Slides are inserting them into their presentations.”
AI tools also make automation possible in content creation. Document entry, file arrangements, appointment scheduling, document data management, and expense tracking have become easier with AI.
In addition, they can use predictive analytics, customer history, market trends, and external factors to predict consumer demands. This facilitates companies’ proper management of inventory levels, prevents drawback issues, and reduces carrying costs, which is tremendously beneficial for operators who are often tight on budget. With judicious implementation of AI solutions, small businesses can access lucrative growth avenues, improve their ease of operations, and keep pace with the experts in an increasingly complex market space.
Unlike the exhausting manual hours and dead-end searches coming with data analysis in the past, there is no longer a need to learn how to use sophisticated AI systems since interacting with AI in a chat-like manner delivers instant answers and raises points automatically. On the one hand, Amazon has utilized AI for corporate purposes, including AI shopping assistance, enhanced voice assistance such as ‘Alexa,’ and new advertising solutions.
