#AI is the undisputed champion among the prevailing disruptive technologies. It has taken the center stage and is displaying its potential across a wide range of industries. The term ‘futuristic’ has been tightly interwound with AI as it brings forth futuristic advancements in any field that it sets its foot on. Corporate giants such as Salesforce and Oracle have integrated AI in most of their day to day operations as they know it can play a crucial component for their growth. You can find many such examples that display the significance of AI in the tech industry.

But contrary to the widespread notion that #artificialintelligence is entitled only to large companies, some small businesses are also taking advantage of AI to enhance their productivity. But the number is still low as many small business owners complain about their inability to choose the right AI model for their business. In a survey, about 39% of small business owners admitted not knowing how to adopt AI for their businesses. It all boils down to the ability of small businesses to be well informed about the different AI models and choose the right one to optimize their business using it.

Adopting AI is not a destination, but a journey. There are multiple factors to be taken into consideration and different measures to be followed assiduously to become successful in #aiadoption. Let’s see some steps that may aid your business in successfully undergoing AI adoption.

Getting familiar with AI

Before hastening into adopting AI, businesses should be well informed about the current trends of AI and what is the role of AI in their industry. Building a strong technical rapport with different AI products enables you to foresee how AI could benefit your business process in the long run. There are several online courses specifically available for AI and its implementation. Similarly, understanding the different AI algorithms provides a better picture of its underlying capabilities. Differentiating between classification, regression, and clustering algorithms enable you to understand when and where to deploy these into action. Lastly, knowing how you can use AI to enhance the different departments in your organizations may give an upper-hand in terms of operability and time consumption.

Choosing the right model of AI

Once you get familiarized with the different #aimodels, the next step is to select the AI model that best suits your need of optimizing the workflow of your organization. Small businesses may face difficulties in adopting the right AI model, so they can resort to open source AI tools to automate a part of their business. Since they don’t have to pay for open source tools, they need not worry about the capital expenditure for AI adoption.

Consider an example — To automate email marketing and to have excellent command over grammar and writing styles, advanced NLP algorithms(a branch of AI) are used for voicing out errors and to offer better suggestions to make your emails flawless and professional. It is a self-learning algorithm that can learn from its errors and add the right words into its libraries. Phrasee, an AI company has developed a language generating system to optimize the email marketing process of its customers. Phrasee updates the subject line of your email with catchy verses and phrases that have a higher click rate among the mail receivers. Companies striving to optimize their email marketing strategies may adopt products like Phrasee or devise their own algorithms that will help them in this process.

Prioritizing costs and values

Once you have finalized the right AI model for your small business, the next right thing to do is to plan your finances. Planning to adopt AI with a tiny budget might not be the most practical thing to do. Hiring candidates who are well versed in AI technologies is not cheap. Remember, these are the employees who can actually help in accelerating the growth of your business, and investing in them can bring about huge returns.

But it is understandable that most small businesses find it difficult to implement AI on their own due to a limited workforce and a smaller capital. But in that case, such businesses should seek the support of government-funded incubators that are dedicatedly operating to help small businesses bolster their AI implementation. For example, in Canada, the Creative Destruction Lab and DMZ’s pre-accelerator program both support small businesses in AI adoption.

Existing digital transformation aids in AI adoption

To achieve most of your AI adoption, your business should have prior experience in digital transformations. In a survey by Mckinsey, it is revealed that businesses having prior experiences working with cloud computing and big data technologies achieve the most out of AI adoption. Mckinsey has also found out that businesses moving into digital technologies have 50% higher odds of achieving better profits using AI in contrast to the companies that do not. In summary, having a digital footprint already established goes a long way in attaining success in AI implementations as well.

Cleaning and segregation of data before AI adoption

To fully unleash the potential of an AI-fueled transformation, there are several data aspects such as data management, data governance, and data usage that the companies should focus on as these are the core competencies that supplement your AI engine. The dataset to be fed to the AI engine should be properly cleaned and segregated into structured and unstructured data. Also classifying data as on-premises data and cloud data managed by different teams helps avoid redundancies and optimizes the AI setup.

It is all about the desired outcomes and not the AI platform

One of the most common pitfalls associated with AI adoption is that the organizations become over-indulged with the #aiplatform and pay less attention to other important activities in the organization. Remember, the AI platform is just a mediator to perform your tasks efficiently and give your employees and users a better experience. Being obsessed with the AI platform does not help anyways in the outcomes. Instead of focussing on the outcomes, it is better to streamline the existing processes and let AI take care of the rest.

To summarize

Adopting AI is not a one-step wonder. It involves taking into account the feasibility, need, and many other constraints in the organization. It is indeed a myth that adopting AI is restrained to only large organizations. Small businesses are picking up the pace in adopting AI by actioning upon all the above steps. In this way, small businesses can assert their stand in the market. If you are one of those businesses, who in spite of adequate planning face difficulties in implementing AI models, you may always reach out to AI services providers and AI experts who can direct you and your business to a successful AI adoption.