3 Ways Companies Are Using AI to Improve Daily Operations

As much as 10 percent of the population or more suffers from dyslexia, but Swedish startup Lexplore is hoping to make this widespread disorder more manageable by applying artificial intelligence (AI). Lexplore has leveraged the ability of AI to recognize patterns by creating a tool that can record children’s eye movements and detect patterns that may be symptomatic of early-stage dyslexia. The company hopes that identifying dyslexia at an earlier stage will allow medical experts and educators to intervene sooner with treatments that can assist with management of the disorder’s symptoms. Lexplore’s invention won the company the EdTech Startup of the Year Award last year.

As this illustrates, startups are increasingly finding innovative uses for AI. But cutting-edge medical applications aren’t the only AI application that is helping startup companies. Here are three ways startups are benefiting by applying AI to their daily operations.

Boosting Security

The same pattern recognition capability that allows Lexplore’s application to detect dyslexic eye patterns is also enabling AI to boost business security. Image recognition is one major application of AI, based on scanning data for mathematical trends in order to identify visual patterns. This requires a significant amount of computing power, which has traditionally limited image recognition applications to PCs or cloud-supported networks. But recent innovations, such as Qualcomm’s Artificial Intelligence platform, have now empowered mobile devices with on-device AI, enabling them to recognize images as well. This allows mobile devices to use biometric facial recognition or eye recognition for user authentication, strengthening security.

AI’s ability to detect mathematical patterns is also helping IT security teams detect threats more effectively. Analyzing security threats can involve large amounts of data and be extremely time-consuming. Using AI machine learning to speed up this process makes security teams more effective. Thirty-three percent of IT security specialists now use AI, which allows them to detect threats faster and address them more swiftly, a Vectra Networks poll found.

Improving Customer Service

Customer service is another area where startups are benefiting from artificial intelligence. One of the most prevalent customer service uses of AI is chatbots. Chatbots use automated live chat to handle frequent customer issues, while redirecting tickets that require human attention to a live representative. For instance, LivePerson provides customized chatbots that can handle simple customer service issues and hand off complex questions to human agents. This minimizes the time agents spend on routine tasks, freeing them up to assist with more challenging tickets. In case studies, LivePerson has enabled human agents to manage up to three to six chats at once.

Another popular customer service tool supported by AI is interactive voice response. Just as chatbots automate live chat support, IVR automates phone support. IVR uses AI to understand caller speech input and offer automated options responsive to the caller’s needs, while directing calls that require human assistance to the appropriate parties.

Increasing Sales

By supporting customer service, AI is also helping startups boost sales. AI can analyze data from customer accounts and purchase patterns to predict what types of upsells and cross-sells will be most likely to appeal to customers. Human representatives and automated recommendation engines can then recommend products and services that are customized to individual customer preferences.

AI can also boost sales by streamlining the prospecting and lead qualifying process. For example, the Spiro CRM app automatically updates customer data, saving sales reps data entry labor. It also updates call lists, proactively alerting sales representatives to who their hottest prospects are.

Strengthening security, enhancing customer service and multiplying sales are three ways that artificial intelligence is already helping startups improve their daily operations. Startups that use AI tools to optimize their operations can automate repetitive tasks, increase their efficiency and gain an edge on their competition.