3 Ways AI is Changing Operations
Every day I either read, talk, or listen to discussions about the current and potential effects of AI on our workforce, personal lives, and society.
Although it’s an important conversation, it’s also insanely difficult to see the full picture of how it can potentially affect us the next year, let alone a decade in the future.
But, as an operator, it is my responsibility to think about, experiment, and wax philosophic as to how my industry will evolve and change with AI. So here are the top three ways I see AI making waves in operations today.
🫵 Personalization
Personalization at scale is a huge area where AI-powered tools are helping businesses to delivery unique experiences to customers. This includes customized recommendations, targeted marketing, tailored content, and much more.
What does that mean for operators? If personalization helps to align the product-market fit for our customers, then we should be prepared for higher conversion rates and increased demands on our infrastructure. This means we better get ready to scale, my friends!
How can we start to prepare? By using other AI powered tools to supercharge our established processes and help refine visibility on performance to strategies. The two trends below are where I would look to get started on this journey.
🤖 Automations
AI-powered automations are supping up platforms to easily perform repetitive tasks and streamline processes to increase efficiency and reduce the likelihood of errors.
One example of this is how chatbots are being fueled with conversational AI capabilities to streamline and enhance the customer service process. We’ve all experienced chatbots when trying to get online support, but have you noticed that it’s becoming more difficult to know if you are talking to a human or bot? Whether it’s answering FAQs, navigating customer complaints, or processing returns, AI is definitely a key tool is streamlining the customer service process, which can be such a headache (shout to all you customer service rockstars out there!)
But, it’s important to note that automation doesn’t need AI to be effective! For a lot of smaller businesses and teams, just setting up simple automations with a tool like Zapier can we be game-changing. It allows employees to focus on higher-level execution like decision-making and problem-solving, instead of remembering to do tasks that a time-based automation can do without fail.
📊 Predictive Analytics
It’s predicted that in 2024 around 120 zettabytes of data will be generated this year alone. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even wrap my brain around how massive a zettabyte is, let alone, with how to begin to leverage that quantity of data within a business context. It feels like an astronomical mountain to climb.
This is where predictive analytics comes into play. AI-powered algorithms are incredible at analyzing large amounts of data and providing valuable insights that can inform decision-making. AI can identify patterns and trends, so that we can then make data-driven decisions as humans to improve operations.
Now in the past, we as operators would be heavily reliant on data analysts and data scientists to set up ways of doing predictive analytics in our business and that’s still true today. But the good news is, there are tools coming into the market with user interfaces made for non-technical user to help empower us to get in the weirds and learn from the data. For example, Amplitude is a great option to gain visibility and insights around your business data for all you product people out there. But that kind of data access and insights are increasing by the day.
👉 Wrap Up
This only scratches the surface of how AI is and will change the way we work. More than ever, we as operators have to be nimble in our approach, flexible in our mindset, and open to new ideas. Hold on tight people. We are in for a wild ride.