It’s not uncommon to hear people decry the rise of machine learning and complain of its potentially damaging impact on businesses both big and small. It’s also not hard to see where they’re coming from. For the longest time, machine learning and the rise of artificial intelligence have been portrayed as a scary, job-stealing, human-erasing phenomenon that will replace us all one day. This isn’t the truth at all, though. In reality, machine learning is a helpful tool that takes over repetitive tasks to free up time and space for employees and businesses to spend more time on much more important things. Here are just a handful of examples of machine learning in action.
Implementing Automated Marketing Campaigns
One of the hardest parts of advertising — especially online advertising, where the audience is a whole lot larger than those who drive by a single billboard or walk past a single sign in a business’s hometown — is determining who exactly the target audience is and how you can reach them best. Thanks to machine learning, companies can implement automated marketing campaigns to better determine the target audience, more efficiently communicate with them, and more effectively bring them in as new customers.
Through this implementation of machine learning, marketers can spend their time and efforts on creating campaigns catered directly to their target audience instead of having to spend that time and effort on determining the target audience in the first place. Not only is it a big time-saver, it’s also an essential tool for businesses and marketers alike.
Simplifying the Recruiting and Hiring Process
If you thought the job hunting process was hard, wait until you end up on the other side of it — the recruiting and hiring process is incredibly strenuous on businesses, not only because they have to conduct days and weeks of interviews, but also because they have to sort through countless resumes in order to identify who they actually want to interview in the first place. As of late, machine learning has been used to simplify this recruiting and hiring process by automatically sorting through resumes and cover letters to weed out candidates that don’t fit the bill.
By utilizing machine learning for this process, recruiters and hirers don’t have to exhaust themselves diving into a pile of resumes and cover letters and can save all their efforts for the actual interviews themselves. It’s a big time-saver, and it also helps prevent any accidental oversights.
Improving Customer Relations
Those who work in the customer service industry have to exercise extreme patience and an expert-level of know-how in order to both deal with unhappy customers and help them to resolve whatever issue it is that they’re facing. This is especially true when dealing with customers who are asking questions that can be easily answered via the business’s website or FAQ. Because of this, businesses have begun using machine learning to improve their customer relations.
Customer service boosted with machine learning uses tools like artificially intelligent chat bots as the first line of defense, so to speak: Customers will speak with the AI bot first, and if their question can’t be answered, then they’ll be directed to a representative. This is an enormous resource for those who spend most of the day answering easy questions that clog up the customer service hotline, making it harder for those with more complex calls to get through.
Enhancing Security Measures
No matter the size of the business, cybersecurity and cybersecurity threats are a very real concern. As long as financial information and other personal data is on the internet, there will be cybercriminals with the intent to take it and exploit it for their own personal gain. With that being said, it’s not always easy to keep these attacks from happening — no matter if you’re a small business or a big corporation. Thankfully, machine learning is working to enhance online security measures like never before.
By knowing how to self-adjust and interpret key patterns, machine learning and artificially intelligent security software can work together to identify and altogether prevent fraud from occurring on a business’s website. It’s become a must-have innovation for any business that conducts business online.
Finding (and Correcting) Mistakes In Real Time
Even the smallest error can have an enormous impact on a business — from a misplaced decimal on an important financial document to a typo on a legal contract to a simple mistake on the operating hours, these little slips are just a part of being human, but they can also have a very real and very serious effect. With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, these mistakes can actually be found and corrected in real time.
Machine learning is designed to identify patterns and recognize algorithms, which means that it can be implemented into your business’s finances or your business’s website and alert you to those mistakes in your dataset as they occur. This can be a real life-saver for businesses, to say the least.
