Artificial intelligence: a service that enhances your SME’s growth – Article by Rodolphe BALAY

If you run a small or medium-sized business, you know how difficult it can be to compete with the big boys, and how important your staff’s productivity is to your company’s growth.

You may lack the resources or technological capabilities to keep up with your competitors. But don’t worry! Artificial intelligence can help you drive growth and improve efficiency. 

The use of AI has become increasingly common in businesses of all sizes. In fact, it can deliver more accurate and faster results than humans in many areas.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of using artificial intelligence for SMEs. We’ll also look at some of the dangers of using artificial intelligence. Finally, we’ll show you how our company can help you develop AI solutions tailored to your needs.

A customized AI tool: opportunities

Tailored to specific needs

A customized AI tool can be designed to meet your company’s specific needs. This can include automating your company’s unique business processes, analyzing industry-specific data, or creating a chatbot or virtual assistant tailored to the customer experience.

This enables your company to make the most of AI to meet your specific needs.

Understanding the market

Using AI can help gather information about your customers’ preferences. As a result, your teams will be able to predict and anticipate market trends. This will help you identify new growth opportunities.

Optimizing results

A customized AI tool can be designed to optimize your company’s specific results. 

This includes reducing costs, increasing productivity, or even improving the quality of your products or services. 

By having a customized AI tool, your company can ensure that the results obtained are most relevant to its needs and objectives.

Better integration

A customized AI tool can be designed to integrate easily with existing corporate systems. This enables you to benefit from the advantages of AI without having to make major changes to the infrastructure that has already been in place for many years. It complements your existing tools. 

Reduce errors

Using a customized AI tool can reduce human errors in your company’s business processes. By limiting errors, you improve the quality of your products. 

This reduces the risk of financial loss and the negative impact on your reputation. As the saying goes: « A very satisfied customer tells 3 people, an unhappy customer tells 10 ». 

Competitive advantage

Thanks to a personalized AI tool, a company can differentiate itself from its competitors by offering more innovative products or services tailored to their specific needs. This can help strengthen the company’s market position and increase its market share.

Innovation

AI can help identify new business opportunities and create innovative products and services. Yes, you need to know how to ask it the right questions. But once you’ve mastered that, the results can be very beneficial.

Improved customer experience

AI can help personalize the customer experience by providing recommendations based on customers’ preferences and previous behaviors.

To sum up, we can say that investing in the development of your own personalized AI will not only save you time, but also money. 

Indeed, according to a study by McKinsey, companies using AI can achieve cost savings of up to 20% and productivity improvements of up to 40%. Similarly, a study by PwC showed that companies that invest in AI can achieve productivity gains of between 15% and 30%.

The dangers of AI 

Algorithmic bias

AI systems can be influenced by biases in the data used to train them. This can lead to erroneous or unfair results. It is important to ensure that the data used to train AI is representative of the target population. Moreover, algorithms are regularly evaluated for bias.

Job loss

the automation of certain tasks through AI can lead to job loss for workers whose tasks are automated. It is important for companies to plan a career reorientation strategy for these workers. But we remain convinced that this will above all help employees to produce more. This productivity increase will lead to faster business growth… and therefore create new employees.

Confidentiality and data protection

AI systems can process large amounts of data. This can present risks for the confidentiality and protection of customer data. It is important to ensure that customer data is stored securely and that confidentiality practices are in place to avoid any risk of data breach.

This is one of the reasons why we advise you to use customized AIs rather than « consumer » AIs like ChatGPT, with which members of your company would share confidential data. 

Complexity

AI systems can be complex and difficult for employees and customers to understand. This can lead to problems of acceptance or comprehension.

High costs

Using customized AI can require high investment in development, training and maintenance. It’s important for companies to set aside adequate budgets for AI.

These costs should be seen more as an investment in setting yourself apart from the competition and gaining an advantage that could be described as « unfair » because you’re going to stand out from the crowd.

Technological dependency

 Excessive use of AI can lead to technological dependency, which can limit employees’ ability to make independent decisions or solve problems creatively.

Example of customized AI for an SME

If we take the example of a real estate agency that has decided to configure Artificial Intelligence for its teams, here are the benefits of having your own AI: 

Better data quality

AI tools can be programmed to analyze and interpret real estate data. This can help real estate agents make more informed decisions (estimating a property, asking the right questions in relation to the year of the building, …).

By having its own AI tool, a real estate agency can ensure that data is of a higher quality, more standardized to guarantee quality with sellers and buyers. 

Team results will be more accurate and relevant.

Data confidentiality and security

With personalized AI, real estate agencies can better control and protect their confidential customer and business data.

For example, an agent could give all the private data of a buyer and seller to the AI, and the latter could complete the sales contract template already configured in the system, in the blink of an eye… and without any encoding errors.

Improved customer experience

Personalized AI can be used to personalize the customer experience. It can offer more relevant recommendations and advice based on customers’ preferences and previous behaviors, while using the tone and conveying the company’s values. All this 24/7. That’s no mean feat!

The customer experience becomes even more personalized and satisfying.

Ad writing

Real estate agencies can use AI to automate the writing and publication of real estate ads. This would generate personalized and attractive property descriptions to attract the attention of potential buyers and increase the chances of a sale. AI can analyze property characteristics, real estate market data and potential buyers’ preferences to generate an accurate description. And why not even create an ad simply by providing it with photos of the property: ability to know if there’s any work to be done, if the apartment is bright, etc.

iterates for your company’s growth 

SMEs who also want to benefit from this technology rarely have the resources or expertise to develop their own AI. The number of professionals in the field is still limited. This is where iterates, our IT services agency, can step in to help. 

So who are we?

Multi-disciplinary approach

Our team is multi-disciplinary and has all the skills you need to set up your own AI. We are experts in development, machine learning, architecture, infrastructure management and deployment (DevOps, DevSecOps, Ops). Our team also includes a project manager and a tester to manage your project from A to Z. 

Developer expertise

There are different levels of developers depending on their level of expertise, such as juniors and seniors. For complex projects of this kind, it’s advisable to use senior developers for the most part. Good news! Our team is made up entirely of senior developers.

Use of new technologies

iterates uses the latest technologies within its reach to carry out projects. Thanks to this, we can ensure that your project benefits from the latest optimizations and can be maintained for as long as possible.

Using Agile methodology

Why is Agile the best method for developing this type of project?  It’s a flexible method that works in development stages, so you can get the first results very quickly and adapt the project according to the initial feedback. 

Ultimately, it reduces project development costs. To find out more about the Agile method, take a look at this video. 

Last but not least, our team of skilled developers will put in place effective solutions that will meet the specific needs of your SME, as opposed to a generic solution that may not meet your expectations. Our solutions are built around your needs. They enable you to improve your company’s services.  

Our agency can help you automate tasks such as inventory management, operations planning, high-volume data analysis, competitive analysis, and much more. 

On top of that, we can provide training and support for your team to ensure they are able to use and maintain AI effectively. 

Make no mistake, AI is not a magic solution that solves every problem. Not everything can be automated! 

So, are you ready to take the plunge?