Inc.com – 4 Things to Remember When Implementing AI in BusinessEstimated Reading Time: just 3 min

By Asim Rais Siddiqui, co-founder and CTO at TekRevol. Asim helps businesses bring their digital vision to life by delivering scalable technology solutions.

Before I get into how you can implement AI in businesses, you need to better understand the term artificial intelligence (AI). The term itself has a broad application of meaning, but it essentially refers to computer software that engages in primarily human activities like planning, learning or even problem-solving.

In our daily lives, we interact with AI quite a lot, and in businesses, it has a variety of uses. In recent years, the concept and application of AI has skyrocketed, and it is now utilized in almost every major industry.

Be it health care, financial, automotive or even logistics, you’ll find an implementation of AI in businesses of all profiles and sizes at some point. The success of autonomous cars is a great example of how AI has improved over time.

To understand what kind of AI is suited for your business, you need to understand the following terms:

• Machine Learning is the kind of AI most commonly used in businesses. The technical job of machine learning is to process huge amounts of data quickly. The algorithms included here have quite a unique feature.
• Deep Learning is a more specific kind of machine learning. However, a major difference here is that deep learning is engaged more with nonlinear reasoning. It does that by relying on neural networks to process machine learning.

Now that you have fair know-how of what kinds of AI are commonly used in businesses, let’s talk about why you should consider AI as a viable business strategy.

Conversations and predictions about AI taking over businesses are not a new thing. In 2018, a survey from Gartner CIO reported that only 4 percent of the total companies they surveyed have invested and implemented AI solutions in their processes.

Even though only a few years have passed, that number is surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, quite different today. According to the PwC report, the contribution of AI to the global economy could go up to nearly $16 trillion by 2030.

If you don’t have AI-based solutions yet, there’s no need to panic. However, it would be great if you started planning to implement AI in your business operations.

Here are some of the best practices and strategies for implementation.

Before you initiate and implement any AI-based operation in your business, you need to have a reasonable understanding of the areas where you need AI in your business. Doing this would help you implement the right technology and ultimately automate and streamline your process effectively.

Moreover, your predictive analysis for the future would be much accurate than before.

It’s important to understand that you likely won’t always succeed on your first go with AI implementation. Whenever you implement new technology in your business, there’s a fair chance of not getting it right the first time because with every new technology comes new risk.

The same is true with AI, and you might face disappointment in the beginning.

The best you can do here is to minimize the damage by initiating with smaller scopes. Moreover, while facing these risks, you can create a negative data log that can help you prevent making the same mistakes in the future.

Let’s be real. AI is a fast-paced market that is growing quite rapidly. The AI developers are a scarce resource, and even if you manage to find someone, they’re going to cost you a lot.

That’s not all. To train and deploy AI-based applications, these developers require a solid computational infrastructure that is not so cost-friendly.

This might not be a problem for well-established organizations, but it might be quite a headache for many small to medium-sized businesses. So what’s the solution to this problem?

Well, there are many AI services available out there that will handle all the work for you without hiring AI developers or building an infrastructure from scratch. I recommend you find and utilize them to fast-track your AI implementation.

When an organization experiences a major change, the right people and the right culture are essential for completing it effectively. The same happens when you deploy AI infrastructure in your business operations.

It is understandable that creating the right culture and acquiring better talent requires a great deal of time and resources. Still, the difficulties with implementation are worth it when you streamline your business with the latest technology and transform it.