Love it or loath it, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a useful tool for startups as they evaluate their goals and how they plan to achieve them.
Here Paula Ludley, PR and communications manager at Shout Connect, a delivery partner of Boost’s Flying Start service, discusses how AI can support early-stage businesses.
Interestingly, we see through the Flying Start programme that there can be a divided opinion on how AI may support new businesses. Some startup business leaders are ready to fully embrace AI while others may consider it unnecessary or that it’s just too early in their business journey for it to be useful.
Even if you’re not an AI advocate, it is still important to understand how it can support businesses and how long you should keep it on the back burner.
One thing for certain, the role of AI will continue to influence how businesses grow. Below are five ways in which AI can support your startup business.
Ordinarily, all the work of business startups is managed by one or two people, or very small teams. There are few, if any, spare resources available for generating promotional content.
AI tools such as Jasper and ChatGPT provide you with content ideas and help to create content that can be shared across social media and other digital platforms.
By simply inputting relevant text, these AI tools use publicly available data from the internet, to create information on topics for your target audiences. You can then use the content for a range of blogs, emails and documents.
Using AI for content generation uses less time and resources than researching and writing the content yourself. It also avoids you missing out on the opportunity for time-efficient digital promotion and organic growth.
While there is a strong argument for authentically crafted content that resonates more deeply with your target market, AI is a good starting point to gain ideas and inspiration for time-stretched startups and pre-starts.
Repetitive manual tasks and basic administration can drain the resources of early-stage businesses or business pre-start. At a time when every second of focus counts, the automation of these tasks can transform productivity.
Examples of AI tools that can be used to automate tasks are:
AI cybersecurity technology provides startups with enhanced security capabilities. It helps cybersecurity systems to detect and respond to cyber threats, monitor existing security platforms and protect the business from dangerous bots.
Machine learning and AI helps your business to stay ahead of cyber threats and respond or remediate effectively before any damage is caused.
Algorithms are designed to scan incoming emails for the likes of malicious IP addresses or links, large attachments, suspicious keywords or phrases, and determine the difference between good and bad bots.
New businesses can be vulnerable to security breaches. AI can provide a robust line of defence, although all businesses should continue to be vigilant.
AI is becoming increasingly transformational for customer relationship management (CRM) systems and the automation of daily processes.
CRM systems streamline business processes, organise customer information and provide easier access to all data.
AI can be integrated into CRM systems to help businesses interrogate data more easily and respond quickly to enquiries. Within CRM systems, AI is instrumental in personalising communications that can enhance the customer experience.
AI CRM integration helps to generate additional sales from existing customers. Having easy access to customer data such as contact details, demographics, communications and purchase history enables a business to target sales activities and build more meaningful relationships with existing customers and new customers who may have previously only ever made an enquiry.
As your business grows you will gather more data about prospects and customers. As your database grows, the integration of AI in your CRM will provide more value in its analysis of data, with its helpful insights and action points becoming more evident.
Information technology (IT) operations is one of the most prevalent areas within a business to benefit from AI integration. Automating IT processes with AI by combining data, analytics, language processing and machine learning streamlines operations.
AI can be used to integrate various IT tools into one centralised platform to make all elements more manageable. This allows IT teams or third party, managed IT providers to identify potential problems or outages more quickly and respond accordingly.
As your business grows and you use more systems, combining those systems by integrating AI tools lowers costs and enhances collaboration. Resources are also more effectively deployed because manual tasks are automated.
Even if you don’t believe that AI can add value to your startup or business pre-start now, it is advisable that you keep up to date with advances in AI across all business disciplines.
Listen to how other businesses are using AI to transform their sales pipeline, administration, IT and customer service. As an early-stage business all insights are valuable, whether you decide to indulge straight away or not.
About the author
Paula Ludley is the PR and communications manager for Preston-based business growth specialists, Shout Connect.
Shout Connect has a team of professionals all passionate about connecting businesses. Its platform offers a unique space for businesses to showcase products and services and to connect with like-minded organisations. Shout Connect is one of the delivery partners for Boost’s Flying Start service and is a member of Boost & Co.
If you’re looking to grow, scale or start your business, use Boost; Lancashire’s Business Growth Hub. We offer a range of funded business support services. Call our Business Support Helpdesk on 0800 488 0057 to find out more or complete our enquiry form.
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