Gene Marks is a former columnist for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He now writes weekly on the economy, business, and technology for The Guardian, The Hill, The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, and Entrepreneur.com. Gene, a certified public accountant, runs a financial and technology consulting firm outside Philadelphia and is the author of five books on business management. He provides commentary regularly on Fox News, MSNBC Fox Business, CBS Radio, and for the Wharton School’s Business Channel on Sirius XM. Gene is also the host of two popular business podcasts for The Hartford and Paychex.
All content herein represents the views and opinions of the author and does not represent the views or opinions of or endorsement by Toyota Material Handling, Inc. (“TMH”). Further, TMH does not make any representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of content. The use of AI may result in inaccurate and/or offensive outputs, and the completeness and accuracy of the information cannot be guaranteed. Such use may subject you to general legal liability, legal obligations related to open-source software, and may jeopardize intellectual property rights and/or infringe third-party intellectual property rights. Content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as financial or legal advice.You should consult your own advisors. Links to external third-party sites do not constitute endorsement by TMH of the linked websites or the information, products, or services contained therein.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the 2023 technology buzzword and for good reason. Its potential is enormous, particularly for the material handling industry. Long-term AI may be incorporated into the forklifts you sell to work autonomously and know when repairs are needed before things break down. All of these are slowly coming. However, there are benefits from AI that your business can realize right now – or very soon. Here are four benefits you should consider.
Office Applications
If your company is like most businesses in the country, you’re either using Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace as your primary office application. Assuming that’s the case, then get ready. Both companies are about to hit you with some serious AI productivity tools soon.
By the end of this year (or early in 2024), Microsoft will be rolling out its Copilot AI tools, and Google will be introducing Duet. Both will cost $30 per month per user. Both of these tools, at least at first, will offer similar features. You’ll get suggestions and recommendations for writing documents and emails. You’ll be able to create presentations quickly just by connecting documents and other files. Both applications will analyze spreadsheets, create charts, color-code data, and speed up automation. Additionally, you’ll soon be able to get transcripts and summaries of meetings.
Customer Relationship Management
Regardless of the CRM application you’re using, you’ll be doing things a lot faster. New AI tools from your CRM software vendor will enable automatic and unattended chat with website customers using internal data, help with queries by internal representatives using internal data, and it will suggest the next actions from conversations. Also, these tools will listen to and generate summaries of conversations, provide training suggestions based on conversations, search external data/news to offer contact info to prospects, and automatically create landing pages for marketing campaigns.
And that’s just the beginning. In the next two to three years, AI will make it easier to perform predictive analytics based on customer sentiment, enable deep personalization in correspondence, launch automatic campaigns based on text (and voice) instructions, automaticallyally create quotes/proposals based on text (and voice) instructions, offer automatic customer product recommendations and sales completion, and reach out automatically to customers based on sentiment.
ChatGPT
If you want immediate productivity from a generative AI tool, then go to OpenAi.org and start using ChatGPT. You can use this free tool to quickly create blogs for your website and even – just by entering your URL – get a bunch of great advice on your search engine optimization. Use ChatGPT to create legal forms, contracts, and agreements or just answer legal questions. Have it create human resources policies or offer advice on HR issues. ChatGPT will offer advice for creating better emails, providing more professional quotes, and will even write your next company newsletter. It will analyze your product descriptions, offer better ways to word your brochures, solve advanced math questions, and translate just about any language.
Is it completely accurate and reliable? Definitely not. When using ChatGPT or any other AI tool, you should have an expert. Always consult a labor attorney, a tax accountant, etc. to review ChatGPT’s responses. It will move the needle quickly and save your team’s time internally.
Customer Service
Customer service is critical in the material handling industry, and AI will soon be changing your customer service operations, too. Soon, released tools will offer smart routing of tickets and cases, use chatbots to give answers to customers, provide real-time support guidance to your representatives, automate remediation of issues, post answers to problems to your knowledgebase, let you know when customer sentiment becomes a concern, provide summaries of cases and next actions and then do real-time metrics and analytics on voice command.
Pretty cool, right? So, how can you leverage these tools? The best way is to simply ask.
Talk to your software vendors. Ask them what new AI tools they are working on that will help you grow your profits. You’re likely paying monthly fees, and your software vendor wants you as a lifetime customer. They’re the ones making the investments. But you’ve got to be aware of the features, and then you have to use them, even if it’s unfamiliar or takes you out of your comfort zone. AI is something you need to learn – and use – if you want to be competitive in the years to come.