Savvy business leaders have been following AI developments for years, long before ChatGPT stormed onstage in 2022. AI is well on its way to changing the work landscape; Goldman Sachs’ March 2023 prediction is that AI could replace up to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide by 2030. That’s a legitimately frightening headline for professional services workers already insecure about their economic worth. Fortunately, the details are more encouraging. Goldman Sachs predicts a new wave of technological innovation and a 7% increase in the total value of goods and services produced worldwide. In other words, a productivity boom. One driven by AI’s rapidly improving ability to inform and shape business decisions. It’s already happening, too. Here’s how AI factors into modern business decision-making in four key areas. 1. Empowering Real Estate Investors to Make Informed Decisions Most independent real estate investors know that the best deals fly under the radar: short sales, foreclosures, and especially unlisted properties. Comprehensive valuation and lead-generation tools like DealMachine are showcasing the power of AI in real estate. Tools like this go beyond the MLS properties everyone else is chasing to uncover hidden opportunities. They have proprietary valuation models that help investors determine whether an opportunity actually pencils out. AI-powered real estate tools can’t (yet) prevent investors from making the wrong decision. But by providing much more information and capability than non-AI predecessors, they take much of the guesswork and grunt work out of the process. 2. Reducing Manual Project Management Workloads Project management solutions like Airtable and Monday.com already utilize AI and machine learning to drive workflow efficiency. Continued progress in this space will likely be iterative, with future versions automating more and more of the time-consuming legwork. But it’ll be dramatic nonetheless. Back in 2019, Gartner predicted that AI could automate 80% of project management tasks by 2030. Today, that seems like a conservative estimate. Humans will need to be involved for the foreseeable future, but individual project managers will be able to do much more than before. They’ll make far fewer of the small business decisions inherent in the project management workflow and focus on the big, strategic ones instead. 3. Synthesizing Vast Amounts of Digital Information to Drive Evidence-Based Decisions Search engine technology has dramatically improved in the past 20 years, but the basic model hasn’t. You type in a query, the algorithm tries to understand what you mean, and then it spits out a bunch of links that it thinks are relevant. Often, the results are outstanding. And often, they’re not. Iterative improvements have worked well enough until now, but it’s clear that the model has fundamental flaws. AI could change that, perhaps sooner than we think. Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE) offers a glimpse at a future where AI responds to your query and analyzes the vast amount of information in that response. In human terms, it clicks the links and summarizes their content without any action on your part. It’s easy to see how SGE could streamline business decision-making and help executives and their direct reports synthesize information much more quickly. While it won’t become Google’s default search model tomorrow, it’s coming, and the implications could be profound. 4. Uncovering Hidden Patterns and Preferences in Consumer Behavior AI chatbots have been a customer service staple for years now. Machine learning algorithms have steadily expanded their influence in digital marketing as well. The next frontier is AI-driven behavioral analysis and predictive marketing. That is, figuring out what the customer wants before they know it themselves. You could argue that talented human marketers already do this, and you’d be correct. However, humans don’t work as quickly as algorithms and often miss opportunities hiding in plain sight. Like other applications for AI in business decision-making, predictive marketing’s value lies in freeing up humans to focus on strategic tasks that (for now) they can still do better than algorithms. People can direct campaigns and make connections at a high level, while automation takes care of the rest. Leveraging the Potential of AI in Business AI tech is already indispensable for business decision-makers in industries as diverse as real estate, human resources, and healthcare. And its ability to support and improve human decision-making is advancing fast. Wherever you work and whatever your role now is the time to get comfortable leveraging its potential. Because while AI might not replace your job anytime soon, it could advance your career. Source: https://www.forbes.com Image: GETTY
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Increasing productivity, improving organizational skills, and fostering a collaborative environment are all goals that business owners strive to achieve through technology. As such, calendar apps are excellent technology additions. You can keep your team up to date and improve communication with these tools. Even though most computers and smartphones come with built-in calendars, there are third-party apps that can help you manage tasks, automate tasks, schedule events, and do more. However, you really want a digital that comes with the following features:
But, if you’re still not convinced, here are the benefits of using a digital calendar for business. Promotes productivity and communication in the workplace. Productivity is a concern for every business. However, many business owners focus on increasing productivity without considering communication. Why’s that a problem? Lack of communication costs companies with 100 employees $420,000 annually. Thanks to technology, your business can reach even greater heights. Specifically, by utilizing technology, you can enhance your business communication. Having a group calendar makes it easy to organize meetings and assignments. Calendars update automatically when changes are made, so there’s no confusion. You can easily coordinate team meetings and events if you have an overview of everyone’s schedule. That’s right; you won’t have to contact everyone separately. Custom events and online meetings can be scheduled with Calendar. You can also customize the scheduling pages. After that, you can choose what time slots to display. You’ll also see meetings from your scheduling app on your Calendar. It’s a lot easier than emailing back and forth. Meetings are now more organized. If you’ve invited team members to business meetings, you can see if they’ve RSVP’d. To get an answer, you can follow-up with them if they haven’t responded. Having a more unified front will make video conferencing or in-person meetings more productive when you know who is attending. There’s no point in assigning them responsibilities or sending an agenda if they’re not going to attend. It’s easy to schedule recurring meetings. With most digital calendars, setting up recurring meetings is as straightforward as creating an invitation. Determine if the event will occur only once or regularly and, if not, how frequently. You can use this method to set reminders and notifications. In addition to being necessary for one-time meetings, they also keep attendees prepared and organized for multiple sessions. Additionally, you can block out important stakeholders’ calendars. A CEO who needs quarterly meetings with his or her senior executives is more likely to meet with them through recurring meetings. It increases creativity and saves time. Time is always an issue when organizing team meetings with your busy team. When scheduling them, the same applies. It saves you time, however, to find the best day and time between them by using public calendars. Additionally, you will never be overbooked or underbooked. Business calendars are like personal assistants who manage the entire schedule of your company. In addition, shared calendars can increase productivity since you have to switch back to your other task after checking your email for approximately 16 minutes. Keeping things transparent. You can hold everyone accountable while respecting boundaries when you know when they are available or unavailable. With a task-based calendar, your employees will know what to work on and when, and you’ll remember how to divide up work among everyone. Managers can schedule crucial tasks for when employees are most likely to accomplish them by making themselves available during their most productive work times. It allows you to balance tasks. With a company-shared calendar, you can also distribute tasks among your teammates. The team calendar can help you determine each employee’s availability and commitments. This enables them to better schedule tasks, projects, and appointments. Using a previous team calendar, you can see what your colleagues did, who they met with, and what assignments they did. Data like this can also be used to plan future projects. If an employee’s calendar is full, you can delegate the task to another employee. You’ll know your calendar is working if everyone’s calendar is manageable and all tasks have been assigned evenly. Better work-life balance. Most workers today struggle to create healthy boundaries between work time and personal time. According to one 2020 survey, 92% of knowledge workers regularly work on weekends and nights. Fortunately, calendar blocking can help you achieve work-life balance. Blocking out personal time on your calendar is a great way to prioritize things outside of work that is important to you. In turn, you can achieve work-life balance if you choose the right path. In the same way you would block out a client meeting after work — you will make family time a priority if you block it out on your calendar. Alternatively, if you didn’t block it out, you might end up staying late to finish a project and missing out on quality time with your children or spouse. Calendar blocking can also help you figure out schedule imbalances. If 80 percent of your weekly calendar block is work-related, you don’t spend 20 percent of your time on personal stuff. Knowing this can help you figure out how to balance work and personal time. Keeping track of important events is important. With a shared calendar, your company can plan ahead and attend events in advance, offering new opportunities for networking. You can also use a calendar to remind you to follow up on the initial contact you made. A shared calendar is also indispensable for trade shows and networking events. Every year, thousands of trade fairs and exhibitions are held across every industry. You’ll get a better idea of what to expect by attending a few events. If your business benefits from this event, you can attend it every year. Know when important dates are coming up. Attending events is crucial to getting customers, and it can be a rapid process. In addition, your marketing strategy should include social media, internet content, and public relations. All of these things can be scheduled using a shared calendar. You can, for example, respond to industry news quickly. That’s a big deal for public relations. If breaking news breaks, a reporter might take your comment as representing the industry. Additionally, a business calendar can provide you with a roadmap for your content. Why? You can use it to keep track of content performance, organize ideas, and schedule content consistently. Maintains the financial health of the business. “Getting and staying organized for the long haul requires developing protocols and processes that close (or bridge) time management and financial management gaps,” writes Abby Miller in a Calendar piece. “If your struggle with self-organization is an everyday occurrence, try these steps,” adds Abby. “First, they’ll help reinforce weak spots with strong, proven practices.” You’ll notice an increase in performance and efficiency within a few weeks of making consistent changes.
Gives team members time to relax and build relationships. We should spend our office time wisely, but we shouldn’t forget to enjoy ourselves. After all, having fun at work is essential to building a unified workplace culture. When team building is not scheduled in advance, it can be difficult to schedule it in the midst of work. Due to the fact that most businesses qualify as large groups, schedulers must be aware of everyone else’s availability. It’s also easier to see everyone’s availability on one calendar. Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/
Arguably the first public-facing instance of AI to truly go viral, ChatGPT stands poised to revolutionize many aspects of the modern business world. While other use cases for AI continue to make an impact, especially in automation, this example of generative AI appears poised to take things to another level. Essentially a supercharged chatbot, ChatGPT boasts the ability to produce written content, including documentation, articles and even prose. Needless to say, generative AI has the potential to optimize a variety of corporate functions. These include new product ideation, project management, customer service, marketing and so much more. In fact, the possibilities seem limited only by the imagination of the user. Notably, instead of replacing the human workforce, it serves to make employees more productive and able to focus on more value-added tasks. So let's take a high-level overview of how generative AI might transform your fledgling business. It might be ChatGPT, Google's Bard or any of the other emerging apps using the natural language processing at the heart of similar AI-powered tools. The benefits of this technology innovation remain crucial for any entrepreneur to grasp. An AI-powered creative assistant As noted earlier, ChatGPT's natural language processing and generative features set it apart from other AI-powered tools. In fact, you might already boast some familiarity with the basic customer service chatbots being used today. Some securities firms even leverage automated trading bots that rely on machine learning. Expect something more transformative with generative AI. Any entrepreneur has experience trying to brainstorm compelling new business ideas. ChatGPT helps optimize this ideation process crucial to any startup or other emerging business. As opposed to trusting the tool to generate these ideas without any human assistance, generative AI only serves to work in concert with your project team. You still need to vet each idea to see if it makes sense in addition to determining whether a relevant target market exists. Still, when considering the fact that most startups struggle to find the funding to bootstrap their early operations, having a creative tool at the ready makes perfect sense. It might help your newly-formed startup by authoring a draft of a job ad, a grant funding proposal or even a search for potential venture studio partners. Of course, you still need to work closely with the tool to verify its output, but this approach definitely adds value to any emerging business. Other intriguing business use cases for generative AI Needless to say, there is a myriad of interesting use cases for generative AI, including ChatGPT, Google Bard and others. For example, generative AI helps marketing by producing drafts for ad copy, social media posts, press releases and more. Other generative tools even create videos and music soundtracks, although their overall quality suffers at this early stage. Since customer service served as an original use-case for chatbots, it stands to reason the higher quality of generative AI provides an even better experience to customers and clients. Expect future model enhancements to support specific industries and topics. With automated trading currently in use in the financial world, generative AI provides a significant improvement to this approach, especially in determining and supporting the specific needs of each customer. The software development process already benefits from automation, especially at shops leveraging DevOps. Adding ChatGPT to the equation helps with code documentation, debugging, QA and more. Once again, this tool makes your developers more productive as opposed to replacing them. The importance of high-velocity software development to many startups definitely makes generative AI worthy of exploration. The current limitations of ChatGPT and generative AI It's also important to understand that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools rely on the initial input query. Even more critical is the underlying data used to train the machine learning model where it finds the answers to those questions. Like many other technology applications, it essentially works as a black box. As such, the quality of its output ultimately depends on the quality of the input, especially that critical machine learning model. For example, ChatGPT's data model at the time of this writing only includes historical information up to 2021. So it's unable to tell you Argentina won the 2022 World Cup when asked. Early media reports from users of the tool are also filled with various inaccuracies or other biases generated by ChatGPT. Once again, it emphasizes the concept that generative AI remains a tool better framed as an assistant instead of something to replace your employees. Even when considering those limitations, it remains obvious that generative AI provides startups with a myriad of advantages, especially in their earliest stages. Expect the benefits to continue to grow as the technology matures and the underlying machine-learning models consume more data. The ability of this type of AI to eventually generate high-quality videos and other media also enhances the potential use cases. Needless to say, any entrepreneur needs to pay close attention to the latest news on generative AI and its most popular exponents like ChatGPT and potentially Google Bard. It just might be the special sauce your emerging business needs. Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/ Image Credit: blackred | Getty Images
Follow these five insights for successfully expanding your online business globally. The potential for exponential growth associated with global expansion is alluring for online businesses — particularly services-based companies. Gaining a first-mover advantage in new markets is often a more cost-effective way to secure market share than penetrating a cluttered and highly competitive marketplace. Global expansion offers diversification and reduces geographic risks by generating revenue from different regions. These economic benefits can make a business – especially a start-up — more secure, with greater potential for survival. Based on my experience over the past five years in expanding into multiple diverse global markets, including Japan, Taiwan, Spain and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, I've gained these five insights to expand your online business globally successfully. 1. Avoid one-size-fits-all strategies When rolling out an expansion strategy, consider that the global marketplace is not homogenous. While the internet provides a single platform to scale a business across geographic borders, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that companies can apply. Every territory has specific characteristics, from the local economic, market and competitor landscape to unique cultural traits, consumption and usage trends, and different mannerisms among local consumers. 2. Identify market potential upfront When it comes to market development, it is vital to understand whether a target market holds growth potential. There are two approaches when identifying possible new regions. As a start-up, we tend to focus on the less resource-intensive and time-consuming option by conducting our own analysis. This starts with desktop research, and we will commission more extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses if the initial research identifies growth potential. When conducting our desktop research, we consider five factors to determine a region's market potential:
The second approach entails paying an agency to conduct research but the costs and time to completion are generally prohibitive. Furthermore, these involved research projects can take 2-3 months to complete, and the market might change during that time, which is a strategic risk. Ultimately, both approaches will deliver more or less the same answer: Either a 'yes' or a 'no' because it is a binary option. We prefer the lower cost and quicker route to understanding the potential market and its net present value (NPV). 3. Test potential expansion markets After identifying a potential new market, it's time to test it. It typically takes two weeks to generate and convert leads in regions with similar languages and cultures to existing markets. For example, when we entered Chile, we mirrored our Spanish Latin page from our Spanish parent area, allocated teachers, some budget and some remote staff from the Spanish sales team to test it. This process meant we had our first customers within two weeks. In contrast, entering unique regions dissimilar to any other region takes more time as we need to customize and localize elements such as our landing page and basic parenting area. In these instances, it can take up to two months to launch. A pilot test is always the first step, regardless of the region, as it enables us to identify strategically significant trends and test specific approaches. In this phase, we often fail, but the more we fail, the more we learn and can make the right decisions. 4. Invest in performance marketing tools In every new region, we allocate a dedicated person to manage marketing. In our experience, investing in performance marketing tools is key to market penetration. You will quickly determine whether the region offers a viable market by tracking the correct metrics. However, it is important to understand that the important metrics may differ between regions. Common metrics we track include:
If the data indicates slow uptake or a lack of interest, businesses can adapt their approach or choose to fail fast to reallocate resources to other identified regions. 5. Ramp up quickly in the new territories Once we decide that we are ready to invest, we implement multiple initiatives concurrently to launch the business. This includes investing in broader marketing opportunities and the best-performing online channels alongside influencer marketing, public relations in local media and affiliate partnerships. Partnering with a local marketing agency in regions where you have no experience in launching online ads is often a prudent approach to maximize ROI and achieve critical metrics early on. Other necessary steps include establishing infrastructure such as telephony and messaging services so customers can engage with the business. We also implement standard workflows to ensure a minimum standard of customer service. From a human resource perspective, building a local team to support the remote team that implemented the pilot testing phase is important. Key local resources should include salespeople and a client service manager. While the team can remain small initially, their goal should be to work through the sales funnel, process every lead and booking, and identify reasons for poor conversions or customer attrition. Customer development also becomes critical to success in this phase. The business must talk to customers to monitor satisfaction levels and get feedback that identifies potential technical issues and informs product development and marketing. In this regard, we conduct a care call procedure to get customers' feedback after using our service for a set period. For example, in Korea, we identified issues around lag times on online classes due to very high-speed internet speeds there. With this feedback, we escalated the issue to developers, who worked to fix it to meet customer expectations. This ongoing testing also informs business strategy in the region. For instance, despite generating numerous bookings in India, we could not achieve conversion targets. Research identified pricing as the major barrier - average pricing in other regions was expensive for consumers there. We determined that success in India would require 2-3 years of continuous investment in marketing and product development to individualize the offering. While the region offers huge growth potential, we ultimately determined that the business could not allocate these resources to the market and exited after six months of testing. Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com
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