21 Examples of AI in Business and How You Can Get Started Right Now

AI is all around us, and the reason is simple: it’s an incredibly valuable business tool.

In fact, over three-quarters of enterprises now prioritize AI and machine learning in their IT budgets. Why? Executives point to greater productivity, higher revenue, and streamlined operations.

However, AI project failure rates are high, and many small businesses lack the capacity to deploy AI successfully.

In this article, we’ll explore some successful examples of AI in business, and exactly how you can get started on the right foot.

How are businesses using AI?

Businesses large and small are using AI to power products and services, automate operations, and improve decision-making.

Powering products

AI can make up all or part of a business model. Some businesses hinge their core value proposition on their use of artificial intelligence.

PathAI

For example, PathAI creates deep learning technology for pathologists, helping to analyze tissue samples more accurately, and also identify optimal clinical trial participants. 

The company is working with hospitals, pathology labs, and research institutions to help diagnose patients and improve their quality of life.

Their deep learning technology can detect individual cancer and immune cells, make reliable diagnoses, and provide estimates about survival and drug response. 

As The Guardian reports, AI diagnosis has been shown to be on par with expert medical practitioners. More recently, AI diagnosis has even outperformed doctors.

Betterment

AI is an incredibly versatile tool. While PathAI deploys AI on pathology data, Betterment applies AI to financial data to automate tax-loss harvesting, trading, transactions, and portfolio management. 

Betterment is often considered the top example of the burgeoning robo-advisory field, which has grown exponentially over the last few years. WealthBriefing predicts that the global robo-advisory field will exceed $6 trillion by 2027, an astonishing feat considering that the field is now just around a decade old.

The term robo-advisor refers to a digital investment service that provides personalized, real-time investment management with low cost and little to no human involvement. 

Robo-advisors give investors access to a wealth of information and tools to make informed decisions, while also taking care of much of the heavy lifting like trading and rebalancing portfolios. 

8topuz

8topuz was created in order to offer the best alternative for retail investors who want savings accounts that operate fully automatically with the help of artificial intelligence. 

Using AI, 8topuz claims to have significantly outperformed the market, achieving 21% ROI last year. While their proprietary AI details are private, AI has become a popular tool among investment funds.

One of the most successful hedge funds of all time, Renaissance Technologies, also uses AI, as reported by Harvard Business School, though they’re even more secretive.

As Investopedia reports, only 10% of trading volume now comes from human discretionary investors. AI and robo-trading are already here, and they’re bigger than many are aware.

CureMetrix

CureMetrix is a radiology and breast health examination startup that uses AI to develop high-precision screening tools. They offer their diagnostic services around the world through their FDA-approved platform, cmTriage.

Radiology is being completed revolutionized by AI. Five years ago, there was virtually no clinical adoption of AI in radiology. In 2020, 30% of radiologists used AI. Considering that AI has already outperformed radiologists, we can expect that number to increase dramatically in the coming decade.

Amazon

Many see Amazon as simply a retailer, but it’s essentially an AI-powered business; everything they do is based on algorithms designed to show the right customers the right products at the right time.

Amazon's AI systems are able to predict what customers want before they know they want it. From a seller's perspective, Amazon has created a market with little competition and a high-value sale (due to their surprisingly accurate predictions). 

Amazon is also using AI to monitor its warehouses for efficiency. Their new AI-powered robotics mean far greater efficiency for workers, as well as 40% more inventory in their warehouses. 

This means that the company is able to use less labor in order to get more work done than other companies.

Further, Amazon’s Alexa is a serious competitor for the likes of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or even IBM’s Watson.

In short, Amazon’s AI uses extend far beyond product recommendations, into virtual assistants, image recognition, self-driving cars, and even Internet of Things autonomous vehicles for its warehouses.

Akkio

Akkio can help power your business or service, allowing you to clinch an otherwise unobtainable edge over competitors, and provide new services powered by AI. 

Whether you’re looking to score leads, reduce churn, or even analyze social media sentiment to improve customer experience, Akkio can help.

Automating operations

AI can use big data for complex process automation, and it will be a driving force behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

PwC has reported that AI technology is set to contribute $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030, as AI can be used in industries from sales and marketing to healthcare and cybersecurity.

Pager

Pager, as the name implies, is modernizing pagers for today’s healthcare professionals.

Their AI-enhanced COVID-19 triage protocol can quickly respond to surges in the virus. As Harvard Business School reports, this successfully resulted in a flattening of the curve where Pager was deployed.

Buoy

Buoy Health also uses AI-powered triage, but for more general purposes.

With Buoy’s AI chatbot, patients describe their symptoms, and the software searches through thousands of medical papers and journals to find the right information.

Depending on the outcome, Buoy’s AI will recommend that the patient visits their General Practioner or connects with a medical professional via telemedicine. 

The software can also connect the patient with a clinic, or in the worst-case, direct them to urgent care or an emergency room.

Photoneo

Photoneo is known as one of the leading developers in advanced automation solutions, with their robotic intelligence and industrial 3D vision. 

Their systems are trained to take on huge sets of data and analyze objects quickly. Their AI system can be adaptive, meaning it can quickly generalize and recognize new types of items that have never been seen before.

Their “pick-and-place” robots have been installed in over 50 million bin picking areas, and their 3D scanners have taken over a billion scans.

Fox Robotics

Fox Robotics is a startup that's at the cutting-edge of warehouse automation.

While Photoneo focuses on “pick-and-place” robotics, Fox Robotics has created automated trailer unloading systems powered by AI-based object detection. 

In particular, they’ve trained AI models to recognize things like pallets, boxes, and other warehouse objects to handle a variety of warehouse tasks.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a company that strives to provide a complete and accurate snapshot of the financial world by using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze data points across 10,000 sources, including broker research, transcripts, SEC filings, and trade journals. 

This data helps companies to make better decisions about their investments and what to do with their money, as well as helping investors navigate the stock market and find new opportunities.

AlphaSense boasts a set of impressive case studies, including helping a $50 billion AUM fund cut research time by 75%.

Twitter

Twitter uses artificial intelligence to suggest to users new people to follow and curates their news feeds, but also uses in-depth natural language processing and sentiment analysis to screen offensive or derogatory language, as well as prompting users who tweet negative comments at others not to.

This process is called "automated detection," and it’s designed to quickly remove content from the site without needing humans to manually review each post.

Twitter has deployed artificial intelligence for a number of other use-cases, including AI-powered image cropping, categorizing live video feeds, and more. Ultimately, Twitter’s customer data fuels an entire ecosystem of AI features.

Akkio

Akkio can help automate operations for any team, including fraud detection, churn reduction, and sales funnel optimization.

Simply upload a historical dataset, select the column you’d like to predict, and let Akkio’s advanced AI models figure out the rest. 

In just minutes, you can deploy an accurate model through Zapier, Salesforce, API, or a number of other options.

Improving decision-making

Artificial intelligence can be used to support any decision-making process. 

It can help us identify patterns and trends in data that we might otherwise miss, and can provide insights to help with the generation of new ideas. 

AI is constantly learning and evolving, which is why it’s an important tool for organizations to leverage in order to make better decisions faster.

Hopper

Hopper is a travel app that uses artificial intelligence to predict when travelers should book the lowest prices for flights, hotels, or cars. It scans hundreds of bookings and presents them with the most up-to-date prices, using historical flight and hotel data. 

To do so, Hopper has built the world’s largest flight database, including trillions of historical prices, and an active feed of around 300 billion prices a month. 

Hopper then uses this data to make predictions about when prices will be lowest and when they will be most expensive. In 2019, Hopper was selling over a million dollars worth of flights a day.

PyMetrics

Hiring decisions are extremely difficult, as the stakes are high. The wrong hire leads to workflow interruptions, wasted training costs, lowered employee morale, and even a negative business reputation.

PyMetrics augments decision-making for hiring by leveraging neuroscience research and AI to match candidates with the right jobs.

Their AI-enabled approach creates de-biased algorithms, which are based on a blind audition. In other words, the algorithms don’t use any demographic information, and only use the user’s app interaction data, which includes a set of cognitive and personality mini-games.

This AI hiring approach has proven to be wildly successful, and PyMetrics is now used by heavy-hitters like Unilever, LinkedIn, and Accenture. 

QOMPLX

Enterprises use QOMPLX to power cybersecurity, insurance, and quantitative finance decision platforms.

In particular, QOMPLX focuses on risk analytics, which includes risk discovery, risk quantification, risk mitigation and remediation, and continuous risk assessment. QOMPLX has raised close to $100 million for these AI-powered tools.

ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot unlocks business data and lets you ask questions about your data.

ThoughtSpot’s valuation hovers around $2 billion, so their AI-driven data analytics is clearly a hit among businesses looking to get ahead.

Akkio

Akkio can help improve decision-making in a number of ways, whether it’s forecasting sales to plan a better budget, scoring leads to determine how to approach potential customers, or modeling costs to create a better pricing strategy.

Akkio lets business leaders implement artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms for all types of business processes, from e-commerce to IoT. With Akkio’s no-code AI, building a data science and AI strategy becomes effortless.

While building predictive analytics and AI applications used to be limited to data scientists, now anyone can start implementing AI solutions.

Grammarly

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that can help with everything from spelling and grammar to style suggestions.

Grammarly has a free version and a premium version. The paid version unlocks additional features like plagiarism detection, tone adjustments, and advanced grammar suggestions.

Icertis

Icertis focuses on contract lifecycle management (CLM). In other words, they build software to help with the entire contract process, from authoring to negotiation to compliance.

Contracts are notoriously difficult to manage, as they’re often long and filled with technical legal jargon. This can make it easy for one party or the other to miss key details.

Tesla

Tesla is well-known for their cutting-edge, AI-powered self-driving car technology.

While Tesla is not the only company working on autonomous vehicles, they are definitely the most visible. Tesla’s goal is to create a safe, convenient, and affordable means of electric transportation.

Neuralink

Neuralink is a company co-founded by Elon Musk with the goal of connecting human brains to computers.

The initial goal is to enable people with paralysis to use smartphones with their mind, faster than someone using their thumbs. In later stages, they could even help paraplegics walk again, and potentially solve a diverse set of issues from blindness to memory loss.

This would be made possible by decoding the brain's neural activity and translating it into digital form.

Starbucks

Starbucks is using AI in a number of ways, from streamlining the order process to personalizing customer service.

In terms of customer service, Starbucks is using artificial intelligence to recommend products to customers based on their purchase history.

For example, if a customer buys a frappuccino every day, they might be recommended to add a flavor shot or upgrade to a Venti. This upselling is designed to improve the customer experience and increase sales.

Should you start using AI?

It's important to note that not all businesses or organizations are good candidates for AI. 

If you have a lot of data, AI can be an excellent way to optimize your operations. But if you don't have a lot of data, or if it’s severely lacking in quality, then you can’t rely too much on AI.

There are many ways that businesses use AI, and a company doesn't have to do everything in order to see results. 

You can start testing by exploring the low-hanging fruit. 

For example, if you’re fielding a lot of incoming support tickets, you could start by building a model to classify their importance and urgency. If you’re handling a lot of leads, you could start by building a model to rank them based on their conversion probability. If your existing customers are dropping off, you could build a churn prediction model to find out why.

This is an effective way of gradually building confidence in the capabilities of the technology without investing too much up-front. 

Conclusion

The world’s most successful companies are using AI in some way, shape, or form. 

This ranges from household names like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, all the way to SMEs and up-and-coming startups.

There are many reasons why companies are investing in AI, but the most common ones include more efficient decision-making and increased automation. 

At Akkio, we're providing the world's easiest AI platform that’s 100x faster than competitors, with point-and-click features that let you build models for forecasting, churn prediction, fraud detection, lead scoring, and more.‍

Sign up for an Akkio free trial to see just how easy it can be to implement AI in your business.