If you’ve been a resident of planet earth over the past couple of years, it’s been impossible to ignore the meteoric impact of AI on business-to-business (B2B) and consumer spaces.
With the value of the global artificial intelligence market expected to reach $407 billion by the end of 2027, it’s clear that embracing AI is soon to be a non-negotiable necessity for any entrepreneur who’s planning to be successful in the near future.
Whether you’re already an early adopter of AI or you’re still figuring out its place in your tech stack, there’s going to be countless opportunities to leverage AI to stimulate your business growth in the coming years.
Here’s five ways that AI and automation are changing the future of entrepreneurship that all business leaders should be aware of.
Eliminating and Transforming Admin Tasks
If you’ve been running your business for even a short amount of time, you’ll know how easy it can be to become buried in
admin tasks and allow a disproportionate amount of your day to be taken up by these jobs.
When you’re constantly having to be reactive and fight a lot of little admin fires, you’re going to find you have less and less time for high-level decision-making and refining your long-term strategy.
One of the most universal intersections of AI and business is the way that it’s allowed business leaders to take over routine, time-consuming admin tasks, from general-purpose LLMs like
ChatGPT to AI-enhanced task management platforms like Asana.
When swamped entrepreneurs embrace this tech and find ways to eliminate or streamline admin tasks, they’ll unlock masses of time that can be invested in other areas, and focus on the “bigger picture” tasks where their leadership skills have the most value.
Making Big Data Even More Valuable
Regardless of the niche or business size, leveraging big data has huge potential for any entrepreneur looking to better understand their processes, analyse market trends, and learn from past mistakes. With the proliferation of AI tools, however, entrepreneurs can now go a step further to fully unlock the potential of big data.
With access to vast data sets, businesses can feed more raw material into AI and machine learning systems, enabling them to derive relevant and specific insights about their business performance, and channel this into predictive models that will help them make more robust plans for the future.
If, for example, all your sales have been logged through an
online business account for several years, an AI model can use this financial data to identify trends when you have peaks and slumps in your sales volume, and make recommendations on how to optimise your spending for healthier operating cash flow.
This is just one possible application of how big data and AI can work in tandem to help you get the most value possible from your data assets.
AI-Enhanced Marketing Personalisation
Personalisation has been a major driving force in marketing for some time now, helping brands to achieve a higher ROI on their marketing budget, enhanced customer experience across all touchpoints, and a more successful campaign every time it’s used.
Some of the ways that AI can be used to support your marketing personalisation include:
More efficient data collection and analysis, while helping your data collection activities to keep within GDPR guidelines and other privacy regulations.
Using natural language processing, natural language generation, and sentiment analysis to personalise your marketing copy at scale.
Feeding large data sets into AI models for better customer segmentation, allowing you to effectively categorise your broader audience and tailor your marketing content to the preferences of different segments.
Analysing trends in customer behaviour and leveraging real-time suggestions to fine-tune marketing campaigns in-progress.
With these applications and more, entrepreneurs and marketing professionals can ensure their campaigns are expertly tailored to the people who make up their audience, helping to forge closer customer relationships and achieve better-performing campaigns.
Product Development and Supply Chain Optimisation
In a similar way to AI’s capacity for creative marketing personalisation, artificial intelligence can also be leveraged to identify fertile gaps in the market, and meet the needs of consumers with unique and practical products.
Like any entrepreneur who’s invested in the success of their business, you probably have your finger on the pulse when it comes to where consumer demands are heading, and what the next driving force in your market niche is going to be.
Human experience and intuition can certainly help make accurate calls about the future of the market. However, AI models excel at pattern recognition and can pick up on trends across several industries and niches that even the best experts might miss, potentially giving you great inspiration for new product ideas.
Following the product development process, AI can also be invaluable for supply chain optimisation, continually learning from demand trends, making inventory management recommendations, and predicting bottlenecks or inefficiencies which may be harder for human managers to recognise.
AI is making further strides in logistics optimisation through physical robotics, famously seen in Amazon fulfilment centres where robots are helping to eliminate repetitive tasks and reduce human error.
Through these kinds of innovations, retailers and manufacturers can not only position themselves to benefit from consumer trends, but create easier and more efficient operations that reduce waste and maximise profits.
Faster and Fairer Hiring
Though it may not be the most visible iteration of AI in business, artificial intelligence is also having a major impact when it comes to hiring new staff.
With the right AI tools, hiring managers are better equipped to find the best candidates in less time, and reduce or eliminate the issue of hiring bias when shortlisting for interviews.
Some of the key ways that AI can be used to streamline the typical hiring process include:
- Application screening by automatically scanning CVs for keywords relating to specific skills, experiences, or other elements of the job description.
- Analysing applications by variables such as education, skills, and work experience, then ranking the candidates based on how suitable they are for the position.
- Administering and grading automated test tasks used to determine a candidate’s potential proficiency in day-to-day duties in the role.
- Analysing the professional profiles of your best team members, and comparing these to new candidates to determine their professional and cultural fit.
Aside from these methods of automating away work for hiring managers, AI recruitment tools can also ensure that hiring process decisions are made as objectively as possible.
Unlike human recruiters, AI models aren’t capable of bias when making hiring decisions, whether consciously or unconsciously. By delegating your shortlisting to an AI recruitment tool, you’ll go a step further in making sure you get the best candidate for the job, and ensure that your business adheres to its fair hiring policies.
Embracing a Brighter Future With Artificial Intelligence
Though AI is still the new kid on the block, it’s already promising masses of value across different processes for businesses of all sizes and industries.
Whether it’s data analysis, creating a whole new supply chain, or simply thinning out your Monday to-do list, there’s likely a range of different ways that you can embrace AI at your business, and use it to achieve more in a shorter time.
We hope this look at how will artificial intelligence change the future of entrepreneurship has been useful as you learn more about AI and determine how it can help you towards your goals.
Daniel Groves
Daniel Groves
