The world is fast shifting from a human workforce to an AI and technology-powered workforce. More firms are using AI and technology for business process optimization than ever before. A recent survey reported that about 80% of companies are now trialing or already use AI in their production process. The data indicates that many businesses are committing heavily to AI and its various applications.

Now, nobody with access to the internet can say they don't interact with artificial intelligence. They just don't know they're doing it.

Remember when you typed the wrong words in the search engine, but you still got the results you wanted? Remember the "did you mean...?" SERP prompt? That prompt is a form of AI programmed to make your browsing more intuitive.

There are many other forms of AI and different applications. It's common to find people picturing walking robots when they hear about AI. However, AI goes beyond talking robots-it's the technology behind automation and many BPM (Business Process Management) tools.

AI is all around us and is fast becoming an integral part of our daily lives. It's about time you and your business take full advantage of it. How can you use AI to improve your business?

Optimize Administrative and Financial Processes.

The most common application of AI for improving BPM is usually towards back-office activities. Back-office activities is the general term for administrative and financial activities in a business.

The back-office encompasses the operational areas supporting the customer-facing part of an organization. And just like back-end programming, AI is very helpful in taking care of back-office activities.

Robotic process automation (RPA) facilitates many monotonous back-office activities. Most administrative processes are straightforward and scarcely ever deviate from an established method.

You can use various RPA tools to take care of repetitive administrative processes. AI will do it faster and with more accuracy than most humans.

RPA is one of the cheapest and easiest applications of AI. Automation guarantees a high and quick return on investment and can work across multiple systems. Thus, automation is perfect for supercharging the back-office aspect of your business process management.

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Improve Customer Communications

Your ability to communicate effectively can build or break your business. Excellent communication is crucial to your organization and business process management. It's an ingredient that can take your customer satisfaction to a whole new level. Indeed conversational AI is currently making waves in its capabilities for customer communications.

You can use AI to offer real-time assistance and support to customers, especially during non-working hours. For example, AI can be the first responder to provide answers to FAQs. In combination with a helpdesk ticketing system, it can help you answer customer and employee queries speedily.

Humans can sometimes make mistakes by giving the wrong answers or poor advice, which can affect business. AI eliminates the risk of human error when responding to customer questions. It will refer to a programmed database and thereby generate answers to customer questions.

You can also leverage AI to reach a wider audience. With access to a broader audience, it becomes easier for you to acquire leads and build your customer base. Using innovative AI-powered software, you can effortlessly maintain interactions with all your customers. AI makes the building of relationships with a large number of customers an easy, doable task.

Supercharge Data Collection and Analysis

It's quite surprising that very few people are talking about the data mining applications of AI. Improved data mining is one of the most exciting prospects AI presents to businesses. AI takes data mining, gathering, and sorting to a whole new level. AI technologies excel at extracting quality insights and specific data from large chunks of information.

AI can optimize business process and procedure by showing you where to position yourself in the market. AI, through machine learning, can identify trends and patterns that are useful to your business. You can sort, categorize, and analyze the information to provide actionable insights. The insights you get from the data can give you a serious competitive advantage.

Your company's business process services will also improve as you act on more accurate data. The good part is you can trust the insights that AI provides. AI gathers, categorizes, and analyzes data with greater speed and accuracy than humans. With reliable data at your fingertips, you have all the answers you need to scale your business processes.

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Measure the Effectiveness of a Strategy

To measure the efficiency of any process, you need gather data about the process and its results. We already know that getting complete data is a piece of cake with AI. With this crucial piece of the puzzle, measuring the effectiveness of your business strategies will be more in-depth and straightforward.

AI can detect patterns and label them as trends. The AI can then use these trends as standards or variables for evaluating the effectiveness of your strategies. This way, you'll get regular, accurate reports about the results of your business processes. Using this information, you can formulate plans for the next course of action.

You can also use AI as a testing solution for strategies before implementing them. The possibilities with AI are limitless, and with the correct application, you'll be able to test your strategies before implementing them.

Hire the Right Personnel

Having the right personnel is essential to business process optimization. But hiring the right individuals is easier said than done. You may have a pool of skillful and qualified candidates for the job, but you can't employ them all.

You also can't pick randomly. The right employee is someone who can handle both individual and team task management effectively.

Now, how do you identify such an individual among so many individuals? You can do that with relative ease using AI algorithms. AI algorithms can quickly sort through CVs and shortlist candidates who meet specific requirements. This way, you can save time and optimize employment decisions.

Invest in the Future

72% of business leaders believe AI is a business advantage and will be fundamental in the future. We agree with them. Some of your competitors will already be improving their business process management with AI. We recommend you do the same.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alister Esam - CEO and Founder, Process Bliss

Alister Esam is the CEO and Founder of Process Bliss, a work management software that is reinventing how businesses execute day to day tasks. He is an expert in strategic planning, business process management, and business process optimization. With more than 15 years of experience in helping businesses run at peak efficiency, Alister has dedicated his career to make work easier, and more motivating for managers and employees alike. Here is his LinkedIn.