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How you can use AI to become a more effective leader

StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |AI|How you can use AI to become a more effective leaderOne of the greatest challenges of business is dealing with the unknown. As a business leader, you must manage risk and reward every day of your working life.

The ability to know if a new product has been marketed correctly or if your customers are satisfied with your brand is something only skill and experience can bring.

However, the rise of artificial intelligence is a potential ace card up your sleeve, waiting to be used. Armed with the ability to understand your market better, interact with it and know precisely what customers will want next can give you a huge advantage over your competition and help you lead your business far more efficiently.

Here’s how:

You can make far more informed decisions

What is the most important information you need when making a tough sales decision? Consumer data. Without it, you are operating blind, and the right decision is perilously tricky to make.

Thankfully, AI – such as the https://smartboost.ai/ system – changes this, because it can collect and quantify gigantic amounts of data on both your customers and your company. This allows you a deep, meaningful understanding of every single one of your prospects, one-time buyers and lifetime customers. The AI analyzes this data and gives you an easy-to-process report, giving you all the information you could ever need to make a reasoned decision about your brand strategy.

You know exactly how your customers are feeling

Because of this huge resource of information, you can connect far more personally with what your customers are feeling about your brand. As a business leader, it can be almost impossible to stay in touch with ‘on-the-shop-floor’ colleagues and the buyers themselves.

Previously, you could be handed completely warped information on the state of the market. Customer surveys can only go so far. This gives you the ability to correct any flaws in your products and better position your brand in the market.

While AI software will be used differently by different departments, you can use it to stay better connected to the day-to-day running of the overall business and track its progress.

Cut down on wasted resources

When marketing your product, it is difficult to analyze what works well and what doesn’t, especially with any real precision. This often leads to huge swathes of the resource being invested in advertising campaigns and even products that consumers simply don’t want. By using AI software, you can minimize this expenditure and focus on the prospects that are most likely to buy, and the products most likely to sell.

Avoid making mistakes

AI is, obviously, not human. This means it overcomes human flaws by remembering everything it has learned and never making the same mistake twice. Even the most level-headed business leader cannot deliver this level of consistency.

With every passing marketing campaign, the AI software will remember what went well in the past, and what can be improved upon in the future. This allows you to minimize the chances of managerial error and gives you peace of mind that (in theory at least) your strategy should improve the more you use AI.

The Dos And Don’ts Of Automation In Business

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Automation in Business|The Dos And Don’ts Of Automation In BusinessAutomation involves using robots and software to take care of tasks. In recent years, it’s become a popular way of improving efficiency in business – by no longer having to manually complete tasks, you can free up a lot of time and energy. Most tasks nowadays can be automated. However, just because you can automate every task doesn’t mean you should automate every task. There are still some processes that benefit from a human touch and automating them could do more harm than good. To help you determine when you should use automation, here are a few dos and don’ts.

Do automate long, repetitive tasks

Long and repetitive tasks can be tedious. These are the types of tasks that are perfect for automation. Robots are able to handle long, repetitive tasks for hours if not days. They won’t get tired and won’t lose concentration like humans (which leads onto the next point of precision).

Do automate tasks that require constant precision

Humans aren’t able to offer the reliable constant precision that machines can. If you’re mass producing a product and need to apply a specific amount of glue to a specific spot, it could be worth looking into automated dispensing technology to do this task. Automation could also be useful for tasks that require precise calculations such as working out complex scientific formulas.

Do automate dangerous tasks

Some tasks could be particularly dangerous. Putting them in the hands of a robot could save you or your employees from getting harmed. Robots are already used to assess burning buildings, clean up nuclear sites, dispose bombs and inspect pipelines. While these tasks are still often manually controlled by a human from a remote location, certain routine tasks that involve dangers are starting to become automated.

Don’t automate user testing

The whole point of user testing is to test a product on a real-life user. While software can be used to simulate some testing, some of your testing will need to be done on humans to get a genuine reaction. This could include everything from tasting food to trialling out software.

Don’t automate marketing

Effective marketing relies heavily on appealing to human emotions and requires a lot of imagination. While there are automation tools out there to create social media posts, send out emails and generate ads, you could find that you get poor results by relying wholly on automation. Exciting marketing campaigns require human ideas – although once these ideas have been established, you may be able to automate certain processes (such as scheduling pre-written emails to get sent out at certain times).

Don’t automate tasks that require empathy

Robots suck at empathy. Any job that involves empathising with other humans should be handled by humans. A noteworthy example of this is handling complaints on the phone – getting a robot to answer complaint calls could end up frustrating most callers. Automated phone answering should only be used to direct people to the right human contact.