When it comes to AI, many companies think of these as projects, with limited scope and short term. They see the high cost of development and deployment and aren’t sure that AI is right for their company. What they don’t recognize off the bat is the long-term goal of reducing costs that may result from applying AI to the right problems. AI is being used across industries to reduce overhead costs and save companies money through automating specific parts of processes and tasks. No matter your industry, a well-designed and trained AI model can be used to cut costs and generate revenue.
How AI Data Reduces Costs for Organizations
A number of different companies and organizations are using AI models to reduce costs and increase revenue. No matter your industry, there is an organizational solution that AI can provide your company to save money. Here’s how these industries are doing it.
Reduce the Cost of Finding Oil
Baker Hughes has implemented AI in a number of different aspects of its business. What they do is to use AI to study their numbers. AI is able to see larger patterns that humans may miss, which can help them to react faster and take predictive action. Baker Hughes is using AI to reduce the cost of finding, extracting, processing, and delivering oil.
Reduce Costs in Clean Energy Production
A partnership between Princeton University, Harvard, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is using AI and deep learning to speed up the development of safe, clean, and almost limitless fusion energy for generating electricity. The AI deep learning model is being used to forecast disruptions that can cause damage to the reactors and halt fusions. By using AI to predict problems, Princeton is finding new, more cost-effective ways to produce clean energy.
Reduce Cost of Customer Service
One of the most accessible ways that companies are cutting costs for their organization with AI is by reducing the cost of customer service. One of the biggest line items for large organizations is customer service agents and call centers.AI and natural language processing are changing the way in which organizations provide customer service. Instead of a customer calling a phone number and speaking to a live agent, the customer chats with an AI chatbot. This can be done through SMS, messaging apps, or on the organization’s website. An AI chatbot can provide a satisfactory customer service interaction while saving an organization money and reducing the number of customer service agents.While this change is cost-effective for companies, it’s also raising a lot of questions and concerns for employees. As AI takes over jobs, many humans are left wondering where their place is at the company. Some employees are even being asked to train the AI that will take over their job.The humans tasked with training AI that will eventually take over their job have a lot of conflicting emotions. While they are proud of the AI and want it to do well, they also feel competitive, and the need to find new ways of contributing to the company.
Reduce Energy Usage and Costs
Another big line item for companies is the cost of energy. Whether your company is operating a warehouse or office building, you’ll need to pay for electricity, water, and HVAC. These costs can add up quickly, especially in big buildings and cities.Conserving energy is another way that organizations are implementing AI to cut costs and save them money. For many organizations, the one data point they get each month is their bill. AI can provide companies with a lot more data points, which can be the first step towards finding ways to cut costs and reduce energy usage. iEnergytics is an energy analytics platform that uses AI and machine learning to collect data and provide cost-reduction suggestions.
Reduce Human Resource Costs
Another way in which AI can be implemented in your organization to cut costs is by reducing the mundane, repetitive tasks. This can help improve worker productivity and reduce waste. What AI is best at are the tasks that humans find boring and repetitive. When you can implement AI to take on those tasks, you can help your workers get back to doing the work that only humans can do.
Reduce Procurement Costs
It’s common for organizations to track procurement costs and losses. And yet, that data sits dark and unused after the month’s or year’s end. That data can be fed into a machine learning algorithm which can look for patterns and make suggestions as to how your business can become more efficient at procurement. By using your own data, you can start to predict changes you need to make before they become problems and get automated insights. Using machine learning in your procurement can help you to get a better understanding and save money around spending by category, supplier, and business unit.
Reduce Research Costs for Attorneys
AI is all about data. Implementing AI to help your business save money and cut costs is all about finding where your organization has a lot of data and how it can be used.A creative cost-cutting solution through AI is attorneys using AI to search for, extract, and organize data. AI is capable of doing this even faster than humans, which can save attorneys time and money. By automating routine tasks with AI, attorneys can get the information they need while they’re doing the strategic and critical thinking.Another example of AI supporting the legal system is DoNotPay. Creator Joshua Browder was inspired to make this app to help average people dispute fees and protect consumer rights. DoNotPay is considered the first consumer Robotic Process Automation or RPA. It puts cutting-edge technology in the hands of the average person, not just large corporations.DoNotPay can be used as a robot lawyer that can help people in over fifty different use cases, ranging from canceling a subscription to submitting warranty claims. The team behind DoNotPay had to break down each complex task into simple steps that a bot can process.The wide variety of use cases and accessibility to average consumers makes DoNotPay a revolutionary tool.
Reduce Need for Medical Experts
Another place where AI is being heavily implemented is in the medical field. Many diagnosticians are using AI to read images and to look for diseases and abnormalities. AI is able to do this many time faster and more accurately than a human. As AI gets even smarter and faster, hospitals and medical centers will no longer need to employ medical experts, who have expensive salaries.
AI is a Cost-Effective Solution to Reduce Overhead Costs
AI is changing how organizations do business, no matter what industry they’re in. AI is altering traditional business processes, causing a digital transformation, reducing waste, and cutting overhead costs. Here are some of the ways in which AI is reducing overhead costs for organizations, large and small, around the world.
Predictive Maintenance
Repairing and maintaining equipment is a huge portion of a factory’s budget. When a machine goes down, it not only costs money to repair it, but the company loses money for each minute that the machine is down.Many factory businesses are implementing AI tools to predict when a piece of machinery will need to be repaired or maintained. With this technology, a factory can avoid a machine going down by repairing it ahead of time.
Maximize ROI
Not only can implementing AI technology reduce costs, but it can also help organizations to maximize their ROI. A 2019 survey by McKinsey found that 63% of those surveyed had increased their revenue by implementing AI technology. With smart predictions and an ability to look for patterns, AI is great for picking up ways to make a business more efficient and to increase ROI.
Limit Human Error
Humans make mistakes. Well trained AI doesn’t. And, unfortunately, human mistakes can cost companies a lot of money. Whether the mistake is a misplaced number on and accounting sheet or an unmaintained piece of equipment, human forgetfulness and humaness costs money.Businesses that implement AI can limit the number of human errors happening at their company. AI that is trained with high-quality data and is regularly updated to correct for drift doesn’t make mistakes. By limiting human error, AI can save your company money and improve efficiency.
Make Workflows More Efficient, Reduce Labor Costs, and Improve Quality
When it comes to workflow, AI can do a lot. AI can help a company to reduce labor costs and improve quality by making workflows more efficient. When a workflow is inefficient, it can cause end-to-end production lags, which are expensive. AI can oversee workflows requiring less human oversight and ensuring consistent production.AI can augment any tedious or repetitive task. Humans are prone to errors when they’re completing a repetitive, boring task. AI is not. When implemented, AI helped a paper production company to reduce scrap by overseeing every moment that a machine came into contact with paper. The ability to analyze data in real time allows for problems to be fixed quickly and to make the workflow more efficient.Because AI is able to automate labor-intensive processes, it can reduce labor costs while also improving quality.As AI becomes more affordable and the return on investment becomes clear, more and more companies are implementing the technology into a wide array of use cases. While the cost to develop and deploy AI tech can seem steep on first glance, the ability for AI to cut costs without sacrificing quality along the way is what’s convinced most companies. AI solutions brings savings — no matter your industry or your use case.