How Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming business productivity

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an everyday tool that can offer endless possibilities for personal and professional growth. With so many applications at your fingertips, it provides you the exciting opportunity to find what direction best aligns with your business goals and explore different strategies and tools to navigate its complex landscape. 

We’re sharing three examples of real-world AI applications and how they can enhance your workforce strategy.

1. Customizing your resources with AI to enhance your employees' skills for the workforce.

AI is a game-changer when it comes to customizing learning and development resources to meet the specific needs of every employee. By analyzing employee data, companies are able to quantify skills proficiency, identify areas of improvement, and pinpoint skills gaps across the team. 

With such a vast array of digital tools available, it's important to recognize which ones are best suited for your company’s success and how to properly customize to the needs of every business. Here are a few common components to consider with AI customization:

• Alignment with business goals

  Ensure your digital tools support the specific needs of your company’s objectives. Different tools have strengths and weaknesses, and it's important to recognize what goals you want to achieve and which digital resource is the most effective to deliver your desired outcomes.

• Ease of integration

  Search for resources that can integrate into the real and digital workspace. Tools that are user-friendly and compatible with existing digital systems minimize disruption and limit training time for the company.

• Scalability

  Identify an AI system that is able to grow with your business and is efficient at all sizes and stages. Scalable AI solutions are able to efficiently adapt to change without compromising its performance, and selecting one that best fits your business is an important investment for long-term success.

2. Automating repetitive tasks with AI to maximize team efficiency.

AI excels in tackling tasks that can come across as routine, and time-consuming. By letting it handle the repetitive work, it allows your team to prioritize assignments that would require more critical thinking and creativity.

Most departments can integrate AI into their tasks in one way or another. Whether it's marketing, operations, HR, or customer service, everyone can leverage AI. The tasks can include analyzing customer segmentation in marketing, observing supply chain management with operations, optimizing the recruitment process in HR, and incorporating chatbots to handle customer queries in customer service. By working smarter rather than harder, AI can save you time by optimizing your efforts to ensure higher productivity and efficiency within your business.

3. Analyzing data with AI to provide insights that empower you to make informed decisions.

AI relies heavily on the information inputted into its system, and determining what insights each person requires from it. While it is unable to make informed decisions on its own, it flourishes in analyzing data to spot patterns and categorize information that can help in your critical thinking process. The common forms of data analyzed by AI include:

• Structured data

  Imagine this as your Type A employee who loves labels and organization - they may or may not have a spreadsheet for everything. By using machine learning models, structured data often focuses on numerical data, categorical data, series data, and text data. This is mainly used with databases, tables, and spreadsheets and ensures AI is a champion at uncovering patterns and discovering valuable insight while keeping the information nice and tidy.

• Unstructured data

  Envision this as your most creative employee - they’re an artist who displays their work with each piece being placed without obvious reason, but it just works. In the realm of AI, emails, images, and text documents all pose significant challenges due to their limited structure and lack of organization. Through software such as computer vision, AI programs like natural language and machine learning are able to extract necessary information.

With structured and unstructured data acting as the foundation of the categorization and analysis of data using AI, this opens the door to all kinds of methods and practical uses for this information. Three common kinds of data collection and analysis used in the workplace include: 

• Employee performance metrics

  Analyzing productivity, collaboration patterns, and project outcomes can help identify trends and reveal areas of strength as well as areas of improvement for employees. This data allows for greater insight into company culture and helps build a more positive space for continuous growth.

• Historical and current data

  AI is able to analyze any and all previous data inputted to identify past trends, patterns, and performances within companies. This creates a wider image of what has and hasn’t been successful, and offers a comparative lens to analyze current data and make a more informed decision through critical thinking.

• Market trends and customer behaviour

  By interpreting different forms of engagement from customers, AI can recognize shifts in customer preferences, predict upcoming trends, and anticipate potential disruptions within the market. Assessing what customers will like, buy, and interact with are all patterns AI can distinguish to help businesses understand their audience and build a loyal customer base.

AI is an evolving tool that offers so much potential to businesses. By understanding its practical uses you can help improve your business’ organizational efficiency and more importantly elevate your overall productivity through customization, automation, and data analysis.

If you’d like a deeper dive into how to succeed with AI, check out our blog 5 essential skills for thriving in an AI-driven world.