AI for Entrepreneurs
Artificial intelligence has moved far beyond science fiction. Today's AI isn't Skynet or Jarvis from the Iron Man movies—it's smarter technology and far more powerful data processing that any business can access. With rapid advancements in machine learning, computer vision, deep learning, and natural language processing, it's easier than ever to integrate an intelligent algorithm layer into your software or cloud platform. For entrepreneurs and small business owners, practical AI applications can lower costs, reduce risk, save time, increase results, and improve flexibility. According to a Vistage survey of CEOs from small to medium-sized businesses, 29.5% of business leaders said AI would have the greatest impact on their business in the coming year. This guide covers exactly what AI can do for your business, how to incorporate it successfully, and how to get started quickly.
What AI Can Do for Your Business Right Now
AI-based tools offer five core benefits: lowering costs, reducing risk, reducing time spent on tasks, increasing results, and improving flexibility and responsiveness. Here are four specific areas where AI can immediately impact your operations.
1. Improving Sales and Marketing
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems collect customer information from phone, email, and social media channels. AI-infused CRMs like Salesforce analyze this data and automatically adjust lead generation activities and marketing based on the insights. This means you can generate more leads for the same marketing spend. AI gathers marketing and sales-relevant insights to optimize nearly the entire customer acquisition process.
2. Automating Customer Communication
Many small businesses now use chatbots on their websites—those little pop-up chat boxes that ask visitors if they have questions. Chatbots initiate conversations and answer customer inquiries like a 24/7 sales or customer service representative. If you don't yet have a dedicated customer service or sales team, a chatbot takes pressure off your shoulders and lets you focus on more important tasks while customers still get immediate responses.
3. Streamlining Human Resources Tasks
AI tools now streamline hiring and onboarding processes while gathering information from new employees to improve those processes further. AI can automatically sort through stacks of applicants to find those who most closely match your criteria, improving your odds of finding the perfect candidate while saving valuable time and resources. Once a candidate is onboarded, the software helps educate employees about company benefits and policies, reducing the time HR spends answering repetitive questions.
4. Acquiring Competitive Intelligence
AI can gather and analyze your competition's activities—from written and video content to social media posts and marketing campaigns. Tools like Crayon use AI to track competitors across digital channels such as websites and social media, collecting information like slight adjustments in marketing language or pricing changes. These AI tools let you gather more detailed information faster, so you respond more quickly and efficiently to industry changes affecting your business.
How to Incorporate AI into Your Business
Step 1: Become Familiar with AI and What It's Capable Of
Take advantage of the wealth of resources available. Luke Tang's TechCode Accelerator partners with organizations like Stanford University and corporations in the AI space. Tang recommends workshops and online classes from organizations like Udacity. Here are several resources to get started:
Udacity's "Intro to AI" course and Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Program
Stanford University's online lectures: Artificial Intelligence, Principles & Techniques
Microsoft's open-source "Cognitive Toolkit" to help master deep-learning algorithms
Google's open-source "TensorFlow" software library for machine intelligence
AI Resources, an open-source code directory from the AI Access Foundation
Step 2: Identify the Problems You Want AI to Solve
Once you understand the basics, start brainstorming how to incorporate AI into your existing services and products. You likely already have specific cases where AI could solve problems or provide demonstrable value. As Tang explains, "When we're working with a company, we start with an overview of its key tech programs and problems. We want to be able to show it how natural language processing, image recognition, machine learning, etc. fit into those products. For example, if the company does video surveillance, it can capture a lot of value by adding machine learning to that process."
Step 3: Prioritize Value
Assess the potential business and financial value of the AI implementations you're considering. Tang stresses the importance of hooking your initiatives directly to solid business values rather than getting lost in "pie in the sky" discussions. "To prioritize, look at the dimensions of potential and feasibility and put them into a two-by-two matrix. This should help you prioritize based on near-term visibility and know what the financial value is for the company. For this step, you usually need ownership and recognition from managers and top-level executives."
Step 4: Acknowledge Your Capability Gap
There's a big difference between what you want to accomplish and what you can succeed at within a certain time frame. A business should know what it is and isn't capable of doing from a tech and business process perspective before leaping into a full-blown AI initiative. "Addressing your internal capability gap means identifying what you need to acquire and any processes that need to be internally involved before you get going. Depending on the business, there may be existing projects or teams that can help do this organically for certain business units."
How to Get Started Quickly
When you're ready to begin implementing AI, bring in outside experts. Tang says the most important factors are to start small, have concrete project goals, and be aware of what you do and don't know about AI.
Run a pilot project. "You don't need a lot of time for a first project. Usually for a pilot project, two to three months is a good range. Bring internal and external people together in a small team, maybe four to five people, and that tighter time frame will keep the team focused on straightforward goals. After the pilot is completed, you should be able to decide what the longer-term, more elaborate project will be and whether the value proposition makes sense for your business. It's also important that expertise from both sides—the people who know about the business and the people who know about AI—is merged on your pilot project team."
Create a task force to clean your data. Before starting, avoid a "garbage in/garbage out" situation. "Internal corporate data is typically spread out in multiple data silos of different legacy systems, and may even be in the hands of different business groups with different priorities. Therefore, a very important step toward obtaining high-quality data is to form a taskforce, integrate different data sets together, and sort out inconsistencies so that the data is accurate and rich, with all the right dimensions required for machine learning."
Start slow and steady. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Apply AI to a small sample of your data instead of trying to take on too much at once. Aaron Brauser, Vice President of Solutions Management at M*Modal, reinforces this: "Start simple, use AI incrementally to prove value, collect feedback, and then expand accordingly." Chief Medical Information Officer Gilan el Saadawi adds: "Be selective in what the AI will be reading. For example, pick a certain problem you want to solve, focus the AI on it, and give it a specific question to answer and not throw all the data at it."
Taking Your Business to the Next Level with AI
Moving to a digital environment involves more than automating a few tasks. You need to involve that digital environment so it permeates and evolves every action within your organization. AI isn't just for Fortune 500 companies anymore. More entrepreneurs and small businesses are entering the AI market every day.
Better marketing and customer insights. AI algorithms can sort through huge amounts of user data for trends and patterns, leading to more effective marketing and content strategy. A Harvard report shows that sifting through chat logs for words and phrases correlating with successful sales can improve success rates by as much as 54%. Social media activity can give AI algorithms enough information to pinpoint purchasing trends for individual shoppers.
Smarter pricing. AI algorithms track trends to help determine ideal prices, optimizing your profit margins.
Freeing employees for creative work. AI can replace humans on mundane tasks, freeing time, resources, and money. An AI complements human employees beautifully—it breezes through administrative tasks while your workers concentrate on more creative activities in essential areas of your business.
Sentiment analysis. AI can analyze human emotions through image recognition software, surveys, social media, and other techniques. Sentiment analysis algorithms make accurate predictions about human reactions to specific topics. This technology was used in President Obama's 2012 election campaign to assess public opinion on policy announcements. For your business, sentiment analysis helps predict customer behavior so you can react in real time as marketing trends change.
Operations optimization. AI analyzes areas like workflows and supply chains to spot places needing improvement. Streamlining your workflow ensures resources are used more effectively, minimizing costs associated with maintenance, lost time, and redundancy. Forbes magazine reports a potential 20% increase in production capacity and a 4% drop in materials for manufacturing operations utilizing AI.
3 Tips for Using AI Successfully
Tip 1: Include storage as part of your plan. Philip Pokorny, Chief Technical Officer at Penguin Computing, emphasizes that improving algorithms is important, but "without huge volumes of data to help build more accurate models, AI systems cannot improve enough to achieve your computing objectives. That's why the inclusion of fast, optimized storage should be considered at the start of AI system design." Optimize storage for data ingest, workflow, and modeling.
Tip 2: Make AI part of your daily routine. Dominic Wellington, Global IT Evangelist at Moogsoft, advises using AI to augment daily tasks rather than replace routines entirely. "Some employees may be wary of technology that can affect their job, so introducing the solution as a way to augment their daily tasks is important." Be transparent about how the technology works to resolve workflow issues. This gives employees an "under the hood" experience so they can clearly visualize how AI augments their role rather than eliminating it.
Tip 3: Balance your system carefully. Pokorny explains that AI systems are too often designed around specific aspects of how the team envisions achieving research goals, without understanding the requirements and limitations of supporting hardware and software. The result is a less-than-optimal, even dysfunctional system. Build in enough bandwidth for storage, networking, the graphics processing unit (GPU), and security. AI requires access to vast amounts of data, so understand what kinds of data your project involves and realize that usual security methods like anti-malware, encryption, and VPNs may not be enough. Also balance how the overall budget is spent to protect against power failure through redundancies, and build in flexibility to allow repurposing of hardware as requirements change.
Final Words
Before investing in artificial intelligence, make sure you have everything needed to make it work properly. Figure out what you'll need, what specialists to bring onboard, and what additional costs might arise. You don't always need to hire a data scientist—hundreds of companies design user-friendly AI tools for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Tools like Legal Robot help develop clear, compliant legal documents and contracts. Grammarly provides consistent, high-quality writing. Many businesses already use predesigned chatbots for customer service, which have improved dramatically with natural language processing, reducing wait times for human agents. With nearly limitless applications for artificial intelligence, entrepreneurs have tremendous opportunities to stand apart from their competition. Start small, prove value, and expand accordingly.
