Benefits of AI in Consumer-Oriented Businesses

AI in Consumer Businesses

What is the immediate benefit of implementing AI?

There is a lot of discussion around Generative AI and how consumer-facing businesses should be leveraging it. But the key question to answer is WHY? What is the benefit to the business? How quick is the pay-back? Here are four reasons to do so, and each of them have immediate pay-back: 

Growth

Businesses can increase revenue generation through hyper-personalised marketing for target customers. Virtual AI-powered shoppers, real-time pricing optimisation, and personalisation can help increase basket size, conversion rates and the all important life-time value even at the point of the first purchase. The enhanced customer engagement, development of new revenue streams through predictive analytics and dynamic pricing models can help businesses to better target their offerings, increase sales, and develop more effective marketing strategies that resonate with their audience.

Accelerating innovation

The old-fashioned way of “go-to-market” is to spend months on conducting research, focus groups, competitive landscape and how to position yourself, calculating TAM and then achieving product market fit. All that has been changed in a flash. GenAI can be used to rapidly prototype new products, services, or features by generating a wide range of ideas and concepts based on customer data and market trends. This can shorten the product development cycle, allowing businesses to bring innovations to market faster and stay ahead of competitors.

Cost reduction

One of the most common and obvious benefits of AI is cost-reduction. Businesses we’ve worked with have been able to reduce costs by 30% or more, primarily through automating job functions and then undertaking job substitutions. By automating repetitive tasks and optimising resource allocation, Generative AI can significantly reduce operational costs. Mainly, this applies to content creation (copywriting, graphics design, and photo/video production), customer service, and marketing, where AI can perform tasks more quickly and accurately than human workers, freeing up resources for other business-critical functions.

Process efficiency 

In conjunction with cost reduction, businesses can develop process efficiencies through automating standard tasks and reducing manual interventions. The main benefit it of course reduction in human errors, and time savings in resource-intensive activities like content creation (product descriptions, social media posts, ad copy etc) to streamlining customer service with AI-powered chatbots, improved forecasting and inventory management, automated pricing and supply-chain optimisation, it can do most of the heavy-lifting, allowing teams to focus on more strategic activities.

The benefits above are applicable to all businesses, but are biased towards e-commerce or consumer-focused businesses. For instance, a biotech firm or a pharmaceutical firm would have a vastly different set of benefits they would get. In your business, what other benefits could you derive?