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How to make sure AI works for your business

According to 2022 statistics from the government, there are 5.5 million SMEs in the UK, making up 99% of the total business population. They are the backbone of a healthy economy and generate growth and employment opportunities, contributing more than £2 trillion in turnover to the UK. AI has the potential to revolutionise how SMEs, and indeed all businesses, operate. The question is how?

We spoke with Pete Hanlon, Group CTO of Moneypenny – the call and live chat experts based in Wrexham – to find out how AI can help SMEs become more efficient.

being accepted into Forbes Technology Council – an invitation-only community for world-class CTOs. Above all, Pete’s vision of using technology to enhance human interaction continues to grow and will shape Moneypenny’s service offering now and over the years to come, to ultimately do more for clients.

Finding trends in complex data

SINCE JOINING MONEYPENNY IN 2019, Pete has dedicated his time to taking the business’s existing technology solutions and software development to a whole new level, by leveraging new tech such as AI and deep learning. Under Pete’s leadership, Moneypenny has developed innovative products to improve and scale the services provided to clients. It’s this passion for technology that has resulted in him

Pete explains: “There are many ways AI can help businesses of all shapes and sizes. It can help with everything from repetitive tasks to predictive analytics, finding trends in noisy and complex data and pulling out those small nuggets of information that were previously hidden in the noise. Alternatively, it can analyse large amounts of data to identify anomalies, such as identifying fraud or security threats.

“For SMEs however, AI can be a powerful tool in customer experience. From using chatbots, to provide a timely and seamless service, to automated support tickets and order confirmations, AI can help to create a more efficient customer experience, driving growth and loyalty. AI can also be used to personalise the customer experiences by analysing customer behaviour, purchase history and preferences to improve your customer’s experience. In addition to this, SMEs can also use AI to help them to create the content, based on analysis of what performs best, like product descriptions.”

Pete is at pains to note that in all of this, that people are still an essential component of checking the AI and in its potential.

Introducing AI into a business

Before you can introduce AI into your business, you need to start by trying to understand where AI can have the most impact. Look for areas where your business is experiencing pain points around manual and repetitive tasks, where there are high error rates or where processes are too slow.

Pete advises: “Determine if your business has the necessary data and volume of data to support an AI based solution. Be clear on the business objective you’re trying to solve through AI, is it cost reduction, improved experience, or efficiency?

Evaluate AI solutions to see if they can help with the pain points you identified. Once a solution has been identified, create a plan with a clear set of success metrics and ensure your train and educate your teams on the new technology. Often, introducing AI will be a big cultural shift for a business, so it’s important that you take your people on the journey and explain how the technology will help.”

Revolutionising how things are done

“When evaluating AI solutions, it’s easy to get caught up in the amazing things the technology can do, but it’s also important to understand its’ limitations. First, review case studies of other businesses that have used the technology successfully and ideally talk to them about the challenges they faced. Ensure there are no regulatory issues impacting your use of the technology and understand your responsibilities in this space. Make sure you have a robust set of test criteria that you use to test how the technology works for edge cases. If your use of AI is complex, seek out expert advice that can give insight into the technology and ensure it’s right for you.”

How AI will change the way things work at Moneypenny

At Moneypenny, the team answers calls, live chat and digital communication channels for thousands of businesses globally, and have always invested in the best tech available. Pete explains: “We’re doing a lot of work around speech-to-text and conversational AI right now. We’re also working with many of the large tech companies, to implement state-of-the-art conversational AI capabilities into our product base. Our goal is for our technology to work in synergy with our PAs and to leverage AI to make the next conversation better than the last, to continue to provide gold standard customer service for our clients.”

Business of tomorrow

When asked about the impact AI will have on business in the future, Pete says, “It’s unclear where the AI journey will take us, but what is clear is that businesses that adopt AI now will be best placed to take advantage of new capabilities as they are created. Businesses that are open to digital transformation and are agile enough to pivot and adapt as the technology evolves will benefit the most. AI will help businesses to be faster decision makers, more cost-effective and more resilient to change.”

Security of businesses and their supply chain

AI is already having a huge impact on business security and the supply chain. It is being used to improve threat detection, to identify potential security threats in real-time, such as cyberattacks and data security. Processing streams of data in real-time to identify and classify anomalies, such as sensitive data being accessed which could indicate a security breach. Increasingly AI is being developed to proactively block inbound attacks and to learn during an attack, so that it can better protect a business from a cyber threat.

Pete adds: “AI is also being used to optimise the supply chain, by providing real-time visibility and predictive analysis of inventory levels, shipments and deliveries – helping businesses to be lean while reducing the risk of running a just-in-time supply chain.”

The ethics of AI: having the right checks and balances in place

It is important to take the time to reflect on the ethics and impact of AI to ensure that it benefits everyone. While it is easy to focus on the positive aspects of AI, it is equally important to consider unintended consequences that may arise.

Pete suggests: “Ideally you should have a person or group within your company to oversee AI initiatives. This group should evaluate projects based on a set of principles, including transparency, privacy, fairness, and the potential for discrimination and bias.

They will be responsible for ensuring that any AI initiatives align with the company’s values and expectations, and that relevant regulators are informed and give their approval for the project.”

How do you find the sweet spot between people and tech?

“You can find the AI sweet spot by identifying initiatives that help to remove repetitive and mundane tasks, or help to supercharge your staff through efficiency gains and insight. If the AI is helping your people to work on more fulfilling tasks, or they are performing their jobs at a higher level with the use of AI, you’ve nailed it.

“SMEs need to embrace the potential and see the amazing places this technology could take us. The technology cannot get there without a vital missing component: people. And people cannot get there as efficiently without technology. People will accelerate the technology, and technology will accelerate the people, sending business on a sustainable growth trajectory, whilst at the same time also doing better business.”

About Moneypenny

Moneypenny is the leading telephone answering and live chat provider, providing brilliant customer conversations to over 21,000 businesses. This places them at the heart of UK business and an ideal barometer of the state of the economy.