5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Impact the B2B Environment

While it is more than clear that apps are getting more and more intelligent, a lot of people are still skeptical or at least unwelcome of the notion of AI. That’s mostly because they fail or refuse the see the bigger picture. In their mind, Artificial Intelligence is either this huge threat or a trend that’s about to replace the human workforce and make it obsolete. What they fail to realize is that this is just a highly sophisticated tool that can finally relieve humans of arduous tasks such as data harvesting and analysis and allow them to focus on creative tasks instead. Here are five ways in which AI can impact the B2B industry.

Machine learning applications

When producing tools and applications for other businesses to use, one of the most important features that they are interested in is the ease of maintenance. In order to constantly fix, patch, and update a certain tool, your partners will have to allocate both time, manpower, and resources, which is definitely not a sustainable business plan in the long run. On the other hand, with the help of a machine and deep learning, you can create digital tools with much lower overhead. In other words, when it comes to your products, more and more partners will expect AI-enabled automation.

Transcription services

Most B2B negotiations take place in face-to-face meetings. In the past, you would have to hire someone to take notes in order not to miss out on something crucial later on, when drafting or finalizing a contract. Unfortunately, this wasn’t that reliable, seeing as how even the most skilled of typists had a hard time keeping up with every single word. Then, a lot of businesses switched to audio recordings as the optimal means of keeping these records.

The downside of this trend lies in the fact that it takes up a lot of space and it isn’t find-feature-friendly. Imagine a scenario where you want to recollect something from the meeting, yet, are unable to remember the exact part of the meeting where it took place. You do, nonetheless, remember a phrase that was used by you or the other party. Needless to say, both this problem and the above-mentioned space-related issue can be solved with the help of transcription services online that can convert these files from audio to text.

Chatbots

While chatbots may be considered primarily B2C tools, this isn’t necessarily the case. Even other businesses appreciate an instantaneous response, which is something that chatbots can provide. Apart from this, in 2018, chatbots are so evolved that it is becoming incredibly hard to differentiate between talking to AI and talking to a real person. To achieve this, however, you need to tailor a chatbot to your brand and in this way turn it into an actual representative.

The greatest concern of human-to-chatbot communication lies in its comparison to human-to-human conversation. Still, this doesn’t lean as heavily in favor of H2H conversation as you might have thought. It all depends on whether you’re working with a purpose-ambiguous or a purpose-specific bot. With the above-discussed trend of deep learning, soon, not a lot of people will be able to pass the Turing test.

Driving B2B sales

When it comes to driving sales, your first stop should always be harvesting the data. With the help of big data, AI-driven analytical tools, and the latest principles of B2B marketing, this should be easier and more reliable than ever before. The reason why the art of driving sales remains somewhat obscure to human marketers is the fact that it’s not that easy to fully comprehend the customer lifecycle. Every person starts as a visitor and then passes several stages (depending on the industry and specific circumstances) before they finally become paying customers.

With machine learning on your side, some of the customer behavior patterns can become easier to decipher. In this way, you will get the information on the exact position of your potential customers and partners, which can help you reach out to them in moments when you have the most potential of getting a positive response. In fact, AI can automate even this, which could help provide you with the optimal ROI.

Real-time response

Finally, one of the biggest problems with marketing and business strategies, in general, is the fact that they are planned as proactive, yet, usually end up being reactive. As for the reaction, each party you do business with expects to be your priority and the only way to achieve this is to respond adequately in the shortest possible time span. How is this possible, you might ask? Doesn’t rushing a response means diminishing its quality? Well, not if you have real-time feedback and an AI tool that is capable of analyzing it in no time.

Conclusion

The greatest difference between B2B and B2C interactions is the fact that the first ones are data- instead of emotion-driven. This means that the quality of service, the offer itself, and the nature of interaction make a much greater difference than they do in B2C where you only have to find a way to exploit the notion of impulse buying. Needless to say, all of these advantages are something that quality AI software can create.