Debunking the Top 3 Myths Around the Use of AI in Small Businesses

Recognised as the drivers of the Indian economy, SMBs contribute about 30% of the country’s GDP and employ around 110 million people. When the pandemic struck, the sector keenly felt the economic impact of disrupted supply chains, loss of man-hours, reduced customer spending, and an overall liquidity crunch. But the sector’s future outlook is rather optimistic, and business owners are preparing to adopt a two-pronged strategy:

• In the short-term – overcome the immediate concerns of reduced demand and revenue.
• In the long term – build business resilience and agility to thrive in an uncertain future.

AI as a business imperative

SMB leaders are actively looking to adopt technology that strengthens their strategy. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a sine qua non in this regard. Here’s why:

1. Many enterprises are already adopting it. In fact, more Indian enterprises are considering AI adoption (24%) compared to the global average (15%). So, AI is now a business imperative for all companies – including SMBs – that plan to stay relevant and competitive.
2. SMBs themselves are looking to digitise customer interactions, workflows, and internal communications, and also to optimise teams as considerations for the future of business in a new normal.

While most SMB leaders don’t dispute the benefits of AI, many cite lack of knowledge, investment, and guidance as the top challenges in AI adoption. Their hesitation to adopt AI is increased due to the myths surrounding its use in small businesses.

Popular myths around the use of AI in SMBs: Debunked

Reality: AI solutions can offer significant process improvements for all businesses, irrespective of size. In fact, since SMBs operate with limited budgets and talent, AI tools can augment their efforts with quick and automated actionable insights, forecasts, and next-step recommendations. For instance, while SMBs are eager to revive revenues, high-performing sales professionals with a proven record of bringing closed deals home are quite expensive to hire. Instead, Sales Cloud Einstein, Salesforce’s AI assistant for sales teams, brings out the star performer in your sales reps by:

• Automatically prioritising the leads most likely to convert and close, boosting the win rate.
• Triggering alerts around any key changes to customer accounts that signal a buying opportunity.
• Uncovering pipeline trends to predict sales forecasts so reps can exceed their quota.
• Automating data capture to maximise reps’ ‘selling time’.

With Sales Cloud Einstein, SMBs can optimise the performance of their small teams and enable their sales reps to sell smarter and faster.

Also Read: From Push to Personalisation: How AI is Transforming Sales

Reality: Implementing AI solutions is an investment, not an expenditure. The key lies in identifying the most viable AI use cases and compelling metrics to measure the impact.

For instance, customer experience and customer trust became critical to business success in the pandemic’s aftermath. And here’s where personalised marketing campaigns that help forge 1-to-1 customer relationships make for a promising AI use case. While larger enterprises spend big bucks to attract customer attention with their advertising and marketing campaigns, SMBs can use AI to launch effective digital marketing campaigns. With Einstein for Marketing for instance, marketers can use the AI-powered Marketing Cloud that lets marketing teams:

• Discover the right audience and the highly-targeted sub-segments within them.
• Know customers better through insights drawn from customers’ online activities, interactions with other brands, and engagement with marketing communication across channels.
• Recommend the most relevant products, content, and categories based on customer’s unique characteristics and preferences.
• Present customers with the next best action or offer.
• Engage effectively with suggestions on when to reach out to each customer and on which channels.
• Identify what’s working and course-correct what’s not across campaigns.
• Take action on day-by-day recommendations for omnichannel campaigns to get the best ROI and to keep KPIs on track.

With such an intelligent solution, marketers can optimise their marketing campaigns, make marketing more targeted and thus, boost ROI.

Also Read: The Role of AI in Marketing: Beyond Automation, Towards Personalisation

Reality: Sophisticated AI tools reduce operational complexities and require little to no human intervention. The right AI solutions are rather intuitive and can be seamlessly built into a company’s service channels and CRM data. Take Service Cloud Einstein for instance, Salesforce’s AI assistant for customer service teams. This AI assistant makes the use of AI in customer service super-easy while elevating customer service experience and maximising agent productivity. Here’s what Service Einstein does:

• Instantly helps service agents resolve new cases by recommending relevant knowledge articles that capture learnings from past closed cases.
• Supports agents by – analysing the incoming cases to predict case fields, enabling automatic triage and routing, and recommending the next steps.
• Eliminates hold and handle time by directing the top, routine issues to Einstein Bots – chatbots that can be built using clicks, not code and leverage a company’s CRM data.
• Increases customer satisfaction with contextual and intelligent conversation suggestions.
• Increases the first-time fix rate for on-site or field service agents.
• Enriches self-service portals with answers, content, and support based on customer profile, interests, and activities to instantly deliver what customers are looking for.

A solution such as Service Cloud has AI inbuilt into the platform. All information that you need is available on one screen to make your interactions smoother and easier, and also the solution easier to use.

Also Read: Use AI in Customer Service to Make your Service Agents Super Agents

Salesforce Customer 360: The SMB’s golden ticket to success

A solution like Salesforce Customer 360 has AI capabilities baked right into it, allowing SMBs to harness the power of AI across sales, service, and marketing functions. With this cloud-based, ready-to-use AI-enabled solution, SMBs need not spend a rupee on CAPEX for IT setup. While the solution comes with a highly-intuitive UI, Salesforce further supports AI self-learning among employees with engaging and bite-sized modules on Einstein via Trailhead.

To encourage the adoption of AI-enabled smart tools in SMBs, Salesforce offers customised pricing and tool bundles that small businesses can try for free for the first 14 days!

Try Salesforce Small Business Solutions today and claim the power of AI to become future-ready.