Can an AI assistant streamline your business?

“Is AI right for my NZ business?” seems to be the question on everyone’s minds this year. It’s all over the media! In fact, it’s everywhere! Some people are sceptical of the impacts this powerful tool may have. Others have already jumped right in! But, before we can look into answering the question of whether AI may be right for your NZ Business, we need to first understand what it is!

What is AI?

A business AI assistant is an artificial intelligence-powered software tool that’s designed to support and enhance different areas of your business administration and management.

These AI assistants (sometimes known as virtual assistants or chatbots) use natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and automation to interact with you, your team and your customers. They can give answers to simple questions and FAQs, perform efficient automated tasks and carry out detailed reviews and analysis of your business data.

Whether you notice it or not, the truth is you probably have already been using AI technology in your day-to-day. In fact, companies like Air New Zealand and One New Zealand use chatboxes to automate and improve customer experience when you get in touch. The Inland Revenue also uses AI machine learning technology for fraud detection. And, most email providers use AI to autogenerate and predict what you are going to write!

How do AI assistants affect your business?

In a busy business environment, having a helping hand to reduce your workload is a huge bonus. As mentioned before, AI assistants help you extend your capabilities and productivity, without the need to expand your team. Assistants can pick up your key admin, operational and customer service tasks, freeing up your time to focus on high-value customer and business development jobs.

Tailored AI assistants can help in various areas of your business, taking on the heavy lifting while you do what you do best – talking to customers and growing the business.

For example, AI can:

• Provide AI customer support – voice AI assistants use NLP tech to talk to your customers. An assistant like Alex from Curious Thing can answer your business phone, offer customer service support, resolve customer queries and answer common FAQs.
• Streamline your bookkeeping – tools like Xero and Dext use a mix of optical character recognition (OCR). That means AI and machine learning are used to automate the digitalization of your receipts and the matching and reconciliation of your transactions and bank statements.
• Automate your content writing – AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard can help you write professional-sounding marketing and communications materials. With quality prompts, you can generate blogs, emails and advertising content.
• Record and transcribe meetings – AI transcription assistants like Otter.ai listen to your business meetings and provide a transcript in an instant. The AI can pull out important action points, summarize the key points and provide a record of the conversation.
• Manage your inventory – AI inventory optimization tools like Remi can help you monitor your stock levels, track sales trends and forecast which products and times you should order. This keeps your business well-stocked at all times, automatically.

We are here to help

Think that AI might be right for you? Well, our team of Business Advisors can help you review your business processes, software systems and productivity goals, to find the ideal places where AI automation could make a difference.

Get in touch, we are here to help. Together we can achieve more!