The AI software market is expected to grow 54% by the end of 2020, to a total of 22.6 billion U.S. dollars, making it one of the fastest-growing technologies in the world.
Slowly but surely, AI is becoming a necessity for many industries rather than a competitive advantage. Mobile app development is still one of the areas where AI is in its infancy. It helps mobile app developers create premium products that benefit customers.
AI is a very versatile technology and its applications can stretch as far as the imagination of your data science team. In this article, we’ve chosen six areas where AI can solve real business problems, increase revenue, and streamline business processes.
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You can predict your customers’ behavior
AI can help you gain more insights into your customer base, and later predict their behavior, preferences, and buying intentions. This opens up for better personalization of marketing messages and the customer experience because it takes a customer’s intent into account, and not just their transactional or interaction history.
There are multiple levels of analysis you can expect from AI:
● Analysis of emotions and intent. Intent and emotions customers channel when they talk about your brand – on their social media or in an email to you – can tell you a lot about their future action and what they think about your brand overall. Unfortunately, this requires a lot of time and effort to analyze.
With AI, however, you can mine unstructured feedback and get deeper insight from vastly different types of feedback data. These insights can then drive action from your organization – everything from PR, marketing to customer service, and product development.
● Analysis of audience segment patterns. We don’t need to emphasize how important it is to know your clients and tailor your product and service offerings to their specific needs. AI can also aggregate all data about your clients – structured and unstructured – to identify patterns in customer behavior. It can also remove human bias and find patterns that human marketers are unable to spot.
As a result, you might end up with segments such as “Fathers who like indie music and are born in the fall” instead of “Fathers between 30 and 45”. With detailed segments like these, you can increase your revenue by 760%.
● Identifying future actions with predictive modeling. AI can also help you understand the key attributes of any historical customer experience data you already have. Typically, this applies to a better understanding of the customer journey. What experiences result in which customer actions, and how can this be replicated in the future.
Provide a personalized mobile app experience
By collecting and analyzing customer data such as past purchases, location, preferred brands, etc you can deliver personalized experiences that include recommendations unique to each user and a higher level of service.
Take chatbots, for example. Just a few years ago, chatbots were only able to answer a few simple, pre-programmed questions. Today, chatbots can act like professional sales assistants or knowledgable customer service representatives.
Chatbots can help customers browse the latest product releases, share interesting tips or exclusive information based on what a customer is interested in. Thanks to advances in natural language processing, chatbots can understand customers and offer product recommendations.
Chatbots can do that even without having access to your existing CRM system. By asking a series of questions, the AI chatbot can gather basic information about the customer’s preferences and make recommendations based on that.
To make the user experience of your app even better, you can also implement voice control. After all, almost half of consumers are already using voice search almost every day, a number that is only expected to grow in the year to come. Customers are especially interested in features such as predictive messaging and content-aware computing.
In general, voice control can reduce the number of pain points your customers might have, which we will cover in more detail later in the article. It allows for a more seamless and intuitive interaction with the app.
Make the shopping experience 5x faster
Our brains are wired to recognize pictures faster than words. It seems natural to bring that element of our nature into how we search and shop for products. This is heavily backed by numbers.
A study conducted by Hubspot found that customers using text-based search spent 2.5 minutes looking for a particular garment, while those using visual search found the right product after only 27 seconds.
As a result, the shopping journey is shortened significantly because the frictions of the text-based search are removed, resulting in a higher purchasing rate. In fact, as many as 62% of shoppers state that they are more likely to make a purchase if they can quickly discover and identify a product they are looking for.
This all comes down to the fact that we rarely look for one particular object. We tend to want a particular look that fits our style or a specific aesthetic, which can be hard to describe by words. The ability to search using images removes the pain point of having to search for words (and ultimately fail and refrain from making a purchase).
The easier way to implement visual search into your AI mobile solutions is to allow users to search by snapping a picture on their phones, uploading one, or even referencing one from a social media platform.
If you are selling products on your app, this is a great way to increase the average basket size by suggesting something similar from your catalog if the size of type of the product a user is looking for is sold out. Or you can offer complementary products that tie into the general aesthetic the customer is looking for.
The fashion industry has been at the forefront when it comes to adapting visual search but this technology can suit other industries as well. Visual search is perfect for products that are hard to describe or products that have a very generic description, thus resulting in a wide search result.
Improve the security of your app
The same principles that enable AI to segment clients or search using an image, can also make your app and the user experience more secure.
Some applications of AI are simple, such as using the customer’s face for logins. But others are more sophisticated and have the potential of saving your company $3.93 million, the average cost of a data breach in 2019.
A key benefit of machine learning in cybersecurity is that it identifies and reacts to suspected problems almost immediately, preventing potential issues from disrupting business. According to IBM, AI can respond up to 60x faster than human beings. That is because AI can both identify relationships between things like malicious files, suspicious IP addresses, and false login attempts and trigger the appropriate security procedures as a result.
AI’s learning abilities make it possible to draw upon previous security breaches to identify future threats, even if they take on a new form. Because AI can analyze cybersecurity threats on the code level, even tweaked or new versions of malware can be detected and blocked as long as they share some characteristics of previously malicious events.
AI can not only elevate your cybersecurity but it can also automate some of its functions. Humans will no longer need to perform certain repetitive tasks, as well as try to monitor every aspect of security at once.
Simplify data extraction
In the same way social media chatter can be hard to sort through and analyze, it can be hard to draw valuable insights out of pdf, text, and image documents without significant time spent.
AI can help understand any type of financial, medical, and scientific documents regardless if they include lists, figures, photos, bars, charts, headers, footnotes, ToCs, stock quotes, etc. This makes it easier to collect data from different sources and convert it into one type for further analysis.
It can also make all types of documents more searchable without the need to convert all of them into one format. You can automate and scale certain business processes, saving you a lot of time, effort, and money.
Key takeaways
AI has great potential to solve complex business problems. With enough data available, you can better understand the needs of your customers. Once you understand those needs, you can offer a hyper-personalized mobile experience to your clients, both in the way they shop and interact with your app.
With AI, you can take the security of your business and app to the next level. AI has the capability to analyze and respond to security threats up to 60x faster than a human being. Additionally, AI’s ability to learn overshadows that of a human, making it better at recognizing patterns in future security threats.
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