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Marco’s Pizza
3 Ways to Integrate AI into your Business today
While artificial intelligence has been a buzzword in the world of business for some time, we are now seeing companies of all shapes and sizes begin to integrate AI into their daily operations with the goal of streamlining for efficiency and maximizing effectiveness.
The companies that will succeed will be the ones able to identify where to leverage the benefits of AI with the strongest impact. While AI can be incredibly impactful in terms of efficiencies, productivity, and enhancing the customer experience, it is important to remember that it is not a human replacement – rather, something that is complementary.
So, how do you know where to begin? What areas of the business are in greatest need of AI integration? How do you test and learn? Integrating AI into any organization takes in-depth knowledge, a vast amount of time and capital, plus a team dedicated to executing such projects.
The below best practices are meant to help businesses begin to seamlessly integrate AI into their everyday operations and drive growth.
1. Start Small and Focused
It is important to gain a clear understanding on where in the business you want to leverage AI and what problem you aim to solve or opportunity you hope to enhance. AI provides vast capabilities from assisting in automation, delivering predictive insights, and more. Be sure to bring in key players from across departments like marketing, sales, operations, etc. to collect well-rounded insights.
As with any tool or solution, AI is most effective when implemented to address a specific area of the business.
Start small with a very focused, singular objective. Remember, you need to be able to collect enough data to make your AI investment worthwhile, so be sure to audit what data you have and what additional data you need to meet your desired outcomes.
Now is the time to learn all you can and to prioritize AI in your organization
2. Prioritize Projects that Drive Value
While you may uncover a tremendous number of opportunities to integrate AI into your business, you must prioritize what projects get completed first. Base these decisions on your brand’s main drivers of value as this will directly correlate with bottom line results. These could include things like driving profitability for franchisees, supporting employee satisfaction by decreasing menial tasks, improving the consumer experience by making things easier and more convenient.
Don’t just follow the trends – instead, focus on how AI can add value to your particular business and determine where it is needed the most.
3. Test and Learn through Pilots
Once you’ve identified and prioritized your AI projects, always begin with a trial before rolling out systemwide. Know that there will be a lot of trial and error – that’s okay. During these pilots and beta tests, it is important to keep track of data to see where you’re making progress or falling short in reaching your overall goals.
Remain flexible – pilot, test, pivot. The whole purpose of utilizing AI is to make better-informed decisions to help your business succeed, so be willing to adjust accordingly.
Simply put, AI is the future – it will become a mainstream element of enterprise-level and cloud technology platforms along with machine learning capabilities. Now is the time to learn all you can and to prioritize AI in your organization. With such capabilities helping drive growth, you’ll be equipped with a roadmap to challenge the competition while fueling long-term growth and performance.
