Artificial Intelligence Is Thriving Into Business: Is It Thriving Due to Sales?

Artificial intelligence can be defined as the concept of development of the system with the human intelligence, enabling them to carry out the tasks, which generally requires human intelligence like speech recognition, translation, decision making, and more. It is gaining more and more popularity in the modern world. According to the survey done in 2016, the organizations in various types of industries are allocating some funds out of their income to invest in artificial intelligence.

This shows the importance of artificial in business. Many of you may think of ‘artificial intelligence’ is limited to the field of technology; however, it is not true. It is thriving in the world of business. How? Thanks to the combination of access to large volume of data and cheap computing power. Although, AI was in the phase of development even before decades, but the combination of huge volumes of data access and cheap computing power was not there in the past.

Sales playing an important role in the growth of artificial intelligence!

Due to globalization and increased competition, many companies are focused on increasing their sales team competency at every level. As sales are the lifeblood of the company, it should not be a surprise that companies are focusing a lot on sales.

Many experts say “Information is power”, and people should try to gather as much information as possible. However, in today’s world, there is a problem of information overload. As the volume of information becomes larger every day, there is a necessity of machine processing power to make sense of the huge volume of information. With the help of AI, it is going to be a lot easier to filter the information and to automate various tasks.

The impact of the use of AI can now be seen in the startup community. According to the report, Conversia announced its $34 million investment to develop an intelligent virtual assistant to enhance the sales. This tool will help in processing email contacts with sales leads by taking advantage of natural language processing. It is a sophisticated AI technology. Nowadays, we can see many companies investing in the avatar as well.

Moreover, the report shows that the Tact (a company founded by a CRM industry veteran), grabs $15 million to add intelligence in the planning and execution function of the salesperson. It plans to increase the efficiency of the salesperson with the help of AI, making them more logical and efficient, rather than making them slaves of CRM tools.

As these companies are trying to help salesperson in many different sales process aspects, it made CRM industry to take a big step forward. Many companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and Base came out with the CRM tools, which contained AI in them. These CRM tools were not just the tools to record some sales transactions, but they also had built-in intelligence to boost the sales.

In the older days, CRM technology was just a tool to record customer information, but due to artificial intelligence, it has been able to significantly increase its value. One can analyze the customer’s experience with the help of AI. The way a machine interacts with customers has significantly improved with an extensive use of AI. According to the study, it is even predicted that more than 80% of the customer interactions is expected to be handled without human beings in 2020.

The use of AI in the field of sales is all about enhancing the efficiency of sales people where they no longer have to focus on unproductive tasks. Instead, they can use more of their time in interacting with customers and closing the sales. In order for the salesperson to take a right decision, they need the right information at the right time. With the help of the information, they develop necessary plans and strategy to increase the sales.

Nowadays, we can also see the extensive use of AI in the customer service department. The increased use of bots is a prime example of the use of AI in the customer service department where bots carry out the initial interaction with the customers for the company. Well, it is not possible for the bots to handle all the interactions, but they are definitely able to handle simple cases. Moreover, the quality of bots is gradually increasing as well.

When the simple cases are handled by the bots, the staffs in the customer service department can emphasize more on the complex tasks instead of wasting their time on the simple tasks. Just recently, there was a report on the release of LiveMessage by the Salesforce. This tool will help in combining both customer service agents and bots at the same time. It is expected to significantly improve the quality of interactions with the customers.

Conclusion

We have seen the extensive use of AI in the marketing department, especially in the sales and customer department. Will it remain limited in the field of marketing? I doubt it. The extensive use of AI in the marketing department may just be the start before observing the significant growth of AI in various other departments in the business. I don’t think we have to wait for more decades to see the use of AI in various other departments. Analyzing the growth of AI, we may well experience the use of AI in various other departments in a short period of time.

The investment in AI is considered by many business houses to give a competitive edge to their business in the market. However, in the future, it has the possibility to become a basic requirement to start a business. Artificial intelligence not only has the potential to enhance the sales units, but it can also help employees to finish things quickly and to increase their efficiency in various departments like Finance, Accounting, and more. The investment in the AI will not go in vain if the investment is planned in a better way.