AI for SMBs: Building up in-house expertise is not worth it!

In an exciting interview with the German magazine IT-Mittelstand, our colleague Stephan Schulz, Head of Product Management, showed why SMBs do not necessarily have to take the rocky road of building up the necessary expertise in-house when implementing AI applications. He also shows where in the company artificial intelligence generates the fastest optimizations and which specific tools decision-makers should look at first.

BUT: A basic understanding of how AI-supported tools work is essential, especially with regard to their limitations. Only then can results be correctly classified and peculiarities such as bias and hallucinations within the applications be recognized.

For SMBs in particular, the technology offers many possible applications that lead to good results quickly and relatively easily and create a competitive advantage. For example in the following areas: 

• Communication: Telephone conversations can be supported with AI to ensure informed and targeted customer contact.
• Knowledge Management: An AI-supported knowledge base makes the company’s existing expertise usable and available over time. This means it is retained even if the respective specialists leave the company. 
• Marketing: AI analysis supports the creation of targeted measures and campaigns, thereby increasing marketing efficiency.  
• Customer Service: AI can speed up and refine inquiries, thereby optimizing customer service and the customer experience. 

In my opinion, many interesting AI use cases can be created with tools related to speech-2-text. These are particularly relevant for SMEs, as they can be integrated into infrastructures and processes quickly and in a comparatively resource-efficient way, meaning they have a timely effect – especially in marketing, sales and customer care.

An example: A customer sends a long voice message to a company sales employee via WhatsApp. However, the employee is in a workshop and cannot listen to the message. Instead, an AI summarizes the spoken word in text form and plays it out on the display. The sales representative can now skim the text and knows immediately what it is about. They can now decide whether they need to respond directly or not. This type of transcription can also be applied to missed calls and machine recordings. AI-supported solutions can optimize this process even further by highlighting key words in the transcribed texts. Users can now get to the heart of the matter even faster and strategically build their conversations – a major advantage in sales. 

You can read the entire German interview in the IT-Mittelstand print edition of November 14, 2023.

Read the whole German interview here on IT-Zoom (pubished: 05.01.24).