Potential for good ... potential for utter nonsense
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has incredible potential to transform the way your business operates. But crikey, there’s a lot of nonsense written about it (and by it too, sometimes).
So, how can you harness the power of AI, while also not making your brand sound like a demented robot and communicating real value to your customers? We’ll look at three ways here for your purpose driven business to dip its toes into AI.
Internal Processes
Perhaps the safest place to start – try it out on yourselves! What internal processes do you have that could benefit from a bit of support from artificial intelligence? A good place to start would be the calendar. We’ve tried out Reclaim.ai and had some good success with it.
The basic premise is that you have a bunch of tasks, a bunch of meetings, a bunch of projects … you give everything a due date (you can use your google calendar, or a to-do app like Todoist) and Reclaim will shuffle things around to give you time to get everything done (allegedly) before the deadline. It’s super useful, actually … and great for teams: the paid plans can sync all your colleagues calendars.
This is definitely a low-cost, low-risk way to get started with AI in your organisation.
Then, there are other applications that perhaps reap bigger rewards. What about in hiring? AI can be used to remove biased language from job descriptions, avoid unconscious bias during screening, and find diverse candidates during sourcing. What’s not to love?
Really, there is so much potential with AI to reduce bias in the hiring process. From simple vocabulary changes (e.g. use of the words ‘competitive’, or ‘dominant’ in job descriptions – both of which are considered ‘masculine’). Then, biases in screening could be removed – a recruiter could unconsciously exhibit bias based on a persons name, the school they attended, and so on … an AI could ignore all of that.
All of which makes for a better experience for the candidate – and ultimately an improved perception of your brand as a positive place to work.
Customer / Donor Journeys
For businesses that have transactional relationships with their customers online – whether through eCommerce stores, or donations to a charity, AI has the power to transform the way they interact with their customers.
AI powered chatbots can provide real-time support to customers. They can even do it in your own brand voice. The software offered by writer.com promises to faithfully recreate your brand voice allowing you to generate support content for your customers instantly and authentically.
From eCommerce companies improving customer experiences, or Charities reaching out to new donors and supporters, the potential is huge.
Using predictive analytics and personalised recommendations, a customer shopping experience can be enhanced – whether that is through offering more relevant interactions, or simply quicker ones.
On the backend, AI can be used to crunch massive amounts of data to help business owners make informed decisions about product offerings or marketing strategies. And, importantly, it can do this without intrusive data capture. Rather than collecting data about a user via cookies, AI can quickly analyse patterns from your existing customers and make recommendations from your own datasets.
Reaching new customers or donors
As with eCommerce companies, AI can be used to analyse existing donor data to identify patterns and examine trends. Based on behaviour of existing donors, mailing lists could be analysed with each record given a ‘propensity score’ – a kind of ‘likelihood of donating’ – from which you could base targeted campaigns around. You could send different promotions to people with different propensity scores – changing your message for each.
Smarter segmentation leads to more effective marketing – greater bang for your buck, Use it to increase direct mail appeal response rates, or for boosting regular / recurring giving programs. Or even to predict & reduce donor churn.
The possibilities are huge. Using AI to reach new donors and supporters, while enabling predictive analytics to help make informed decisions about fundraising efforts, could help give your business the edge.
In conclusion …
… AI has the potential to significantly impact the way purpose-driven businesses operate, from streamlining internal processes, improving customer experiences, to reaching new customers and donors.
As businesses adopt AI, it is important to balance its use with their values and goals, ensuring that it is used in a responsible and ethical manner. Whether it is through automating routine tasks, providing real-time support, or analysing data to make informed decisions, AI can help businesses achieve their goals more efficiently and effectively.
Purpose-driven businesses that embrace AI can not only improve their operations but also increase their impact and drive growth, all while staying true to their values. As an ethical digital agency, we believe that AI has the potential to transform the way businesses operate and we are here to support organisations in harnessing its power.