The government also recognises this and is providing support and funding to SMEs, such as the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s Advanced Digital Solutions, which supports the adoption of advanced technologies like AI and robotics.

AI can take your business to the next level by improving efficiency, accuracy and decision-making, as well as saving costs and securing a competitive edge. This is especially helpful for SMEs, whose limited manpower would benefit from AI’s automation and assistance capabilities.

Here are four areas where AI can help boost your business:

1. Meeting transcribing/note-taking

Software such as Fireflies can be a great help during meetings. They allow you to record, transcribe and search through voice conversations – all with the click of a button. With the help of AI, the need for tedious note-taking is significantly reduced during meetings.

This means employees can give their full attention to the subject of discussion and contribute more actively your meetings.

Many are already adopting such software. For example, Fireflies is being used across over 100,000 companies including big players like Nike and Uber.

2. Customer relations

AI can help you better market your products to your audience as well. For example, HubSpot is a marketing automation software which assists in content creation and social media management.

HubSpot’s new AI tool Content Assistant can help with a myriad of tasks. From drafting sales emails to social media posts, it can assist with the time-intensive task of content creation. For example, it can draft a prospecting email for sales outreach, and integrate this with marketing and sales tools to track audience data. 

3. Accounting

Financial management, while crucial for any organisation, can often be tedious too. Accounting tools like Xero can assist with tasks such as expense tracking and invoice management.

No more sitting hunched over an accounts book and an Excel sheet as you painstakingly key in every figure before squinting to make sure everything is in order – Xero can take care of it all with a few simple clicks. One of the ways it uses AI is in bank reconciliation predictions, using machine learning to predict the contact and account code for certain transactions that cannot be matched to invoices or bills. This could otherwise be a laborious manual process with potential human error risks.

4. Data analytics

In this new digital age, data is king. AI software like IBM Watson Analytics can help extract insights from customer data easily, saving you time sifting through data. Its intuitive platform uses natural language processing. This means that its software can comprehend and output in text and spoken words that the user understands, rather than lines of computer code.

Utilising these AI data analytics platforms will allow you to understand the needs and preferences of your customer, thus enabling you to make data-driven decisions and create solutions which better serve them.

Without a doubt, AI can bolster your business and take it to the next level. However, the powerful tool may not yet be a jack of all trades – some tasks still require a human touch. As with any piece of technology, AI comes with its own cyber risks. Adopting AI in this day and age is a must, but businesses also need to implement measures to mitigate any potential digital risks.