Three Ways to Become a Leader in AI and Increase Your Revenue

This article dives into how to become a leader in AI. In a year where uncertainty has become the norm, it can be tempting to press pause on innovation. Any short-term benefit, however, will likely be eclipsed by dampened revenues over the longer term.

Businesses large and small that are facing this new reality find solace in the fact that many leaders faced similar turbulence and uncertainty during economic crises in 1987, 2001, and again in 2008. While today’s economic climate is the result of a completely new threat — an unseen viral assailant that doesn’t recognize borders or industries — well-managed organizations are seeing opportunity despite the chaos.

How to be a Leader in AI

Many businesses are accelerating a push to use AI to solve big problems and position them for next-generation products and services. AI now is helping nurses monitor their patients, service providers streamline warehouses and manufacturing, and even helping retailers keep us safer with grab-and-go checkouts at grocery stores.

It’s important to recognize that AI innovation isn’t limited to just a few industries. Organizations around the world are finding practical ways to inject AI into their business practices. Here are three areas where AI can have an immediate, positive impact on revenue:

1. Use AI to Catch Customers Before They Leave

It’s never been more important to intercept those who are less than satisfied and to build goodwill before customers leave. As every good marketer knows, it costs far more to acquire a new customer than to retain those you already have.

AI models can be used to predict follow up when a potential customer leaves an item in their cart, and even to determine what items to showcase online when understanding that a consumer is in the process of moving.

For longer-term gains, it’s being used by telecoms and retailers, among others, to predict when a customer may churn, enabling retention campaigns that highlight a better offer than what they’d get with a competitor.

Natural language processing (NLP) also helps organizations triage and scale customer service with chatbot dialog that continually gets smarter and more conversational.

While these models are huge and might normally take weeks to train on yesterday’s infrastructure, today’s computing power introduces new possibilities. For example, in 2015, the ResNet-50 neural network took 25 days to train.

In the MLPerf results published in July 2020, the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD trained ResNet in less than a minute, which can help enterprises quickly test new approaches and put the results into action.

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Additionally, AI can help surprise and delight customers.

Dominos for example, uses AI trained on NVIDIA DGX to predict when a customer’s order will be ready. They’ve boosted accuracy from 75% to 95% by analyzing multiple factors, including the number of employees working, order complexity, pipeline and current traffic conditions, helping to make sure hungry customers know when to pick up hot, fresh pizza.

2. Use AI to Streamline Operations and Boost Quality Control

Waste is a luxury few can afford at the best of times. Today, organizations are watching their budgets more closely than ever to ensure that every dollar is being put to the best use possible. AI is exceptional at eliminating repetitive or wasteful areas of spend that tend to drive up OpEx. With AI added to process automation, organizations are eliminating cycle-consuming tasks that create unnecessary overhead and operational bloat.

You can find examples of AI-driven savings in every sector.

For example, AI-powered drones are being used for Quality Control Automation on industrial site inspections to detect faults in physical infrastructure before they become costly or even dangerous. Companies like BHGE use AI trained on their AI platforms to help their customers complete faster inspections of large facilities, at a fraction of the cost and without exposing human workers to dangerous, inhospitable environments.

In retail, companies like Walmart are using RAPIDS GPU-accelerated data science software to help build models that improve forecasting and optimize inventory levels. As you can imagine, improving forecast accuracy by even 1% would have a huge impact on a company that sells hundreds of billions of dollars in goods each year.

3. Use AI-Guided Predictive Modeling to Find Strategic Opportunities Others Miss

Smart businesses must watch the changing currents to spot shifts in the marketplace that create growth opportunities.

Just think back to retailers that missed the e-commerce boat, lighting manufacturers that didn’t get in front of the LED wave, and video rental stores caught off guard as Netflix waded ashore.

Spotting trends or shifts in a market can be challenging, as the clues can appear like drops in an ocean of data. Luckily, if there’s one thing AI excels at, it’s distilling those droplets into actionable insights.

For example, the energy industry is facing unprecedented challenges – everything from finding new sources of energy to delivering it. To help customers transform themselves into digital enterprises, companies like Avitas and BHGE are helping energy providers leverage their data to find opportunities for massive savings in operating costs.

There are also many clues to new opportunities hidden in customer service operations. Beyond NLP, customer call center recordings can be mined to gain insights that might otherwise be lost because they haven’t been explored.

While the average enterprise is inspecting 2% of customer service recordings, with a transcription accuracy of 20%, AI helps businesses mine 100% of such recordings at almost 100% accuracy. This can help uncover and identify emerging trends and opportunities.

Finding Smooth Sailing

It’s been said that smooth seas don’t make skilled sailors.

Today’s business climate is presenting many unexpected challenges. With the right tools, platform and IT infrastructure strategy, companies can stay on top of the opportunities that are available to agile, strategic organizations. As we’ve seen, AI is one of the most powerful instruments available to help organizations navigate through turbulent waters and come out even stronger on the other side.

Industry leaders around the world are increasingly using AI to help them discover opportunities for revenue growth. If you’re not sure where to start in integrating AI into your own business, look for other leaders to help you determine the right platforms and strategies for success.

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