Over the past few years, AI has evolved from a niche technology to a mainstream tool, impacting both businesses and consumers equally. Companies that develop AI models, such as OpenAI, are collecting vast amounts of data to continuously refine and enhance these models, leading to unprecedented levels of efficiency and accuracy.
AI for businesses has shifted from being a competitive advantage to becoming a business necessity. Those who fail to integrate AI into their operations risk falling behind, missing out on the cost savings and improved outcomes that this technology can deliver. As AI continues to grow in both capability and adoption, understanding its role in business operations is essential for staying competitive in today’s digital-first market.
Artificial Intelligence Statistics
The global AI market size was estimated at 196.63 billion dollars in 2023 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 36% by 2030. This can be attributed to tech giants providing solutions that drive the adoption of AI. Currently, this technology is being utilized in numerous industries, including automotive, healthcare, retail, finance, and manufacturing.
This confirms that AI is here to stay, gaining more popularity than previously thought.
This boost in popularity can be attributed to Generative AI, as companies like OpenAI have paved the road for AI adoption. They have created advanced AI tools and made them available to your average consumer. This allowed AI to reach the mainstream market, showcasing its utility for millions of users.
This also introduced additional career opportunities for people looking to work with AI. We’ve seen the emergence of Prompt Engineers, which is a title that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for ChatGPT.
AI Adoption in Business Operations in UAE
Artificial intelligence for business has taken over in the UAE, as the country has launched an initiative to become a leading global player by 2031. Once we discuss the technology’s utility, it’ll be clear why countries all over the world are racing to take advantage of the additional benefits it can bring businesses across all sectors.
The IBM global adoption index highlights that 34% of companies have already deployed AI in their business operations while 30% are currently in the process of developing their own AI-based solution for their companies. Artificial intelligence for businesses has become a necessity for businesses to become competitive in today’s market.
The Role of AI in Business Growth
Artificial intelligence plays a significant role in enhancing business operations. A few aspects we’re going to look at are its role in improving:
- Operational efficiency
- Customer experience
- Decision making
Let’s go through these and explore them in further detail.
AI and Business Operational Efficiency
This refers to the application of AI and ML (machine learning) to optimize business processes. This in turn leads to a few outcomes, including improved productivity and reduced costs. Generally speaking, the goal is to automate operational tasks, allocating human resources for more strategic tasks. This not only enhances your business processes but also reduces the chances of human error.
When working with AI solutions, it’s imperative to make them user-friendly and easy to integrate with existing solutions. If this isn’t an area of focus for developers, these solutions would be too expensive to integrate while requiring a lot of training for any benefit to be worth implementation.
One major area that would benefit from AI and automation would be HR activities, namely all initial activities related to dealing with candidate submissions related to a job vacancy. At imaga, we’ve implemented many AI solutions for our clients as well as our internal operations. We published an article discussing how we were able to save ourselves over 25 hours per 100 candidates by implementing an HR bot that would process, respond to questions, and send out test assignments to potential candidates. If you’d like to learn more about how we did so, you can check out our full article here.
Another example would be QA. Testing could take hundreds of hours of manual labor to complete. This is an unreasonable amount of time considering the existence of AI solutions for companies. The primary advantage is the speed and accuracy of performed tests. With AI, test case creation and execution can be done automatically. This reduces the time and effort required for QA tests.
Going back to HR, on-boarding could also become seamless with the help of AI. On average, companies spend enormous amounts of money on helping employees fit in within a company. To put this into perspective, a study conducted by SHRM found that it costs $4,100 to onboard a single employee. This is one of the ideal cases for an AI model, as for a 100-employee business, this could translate to almost half a million dollars in savings.
How AI Enhances Customer Experience
AI has penetrated the customer service industry, providing more help, better, and saving businesses a ton of money while bringing in more revenue and loyal clients. There’s no better way to demonstrate how useful AI can be other than through statistics. Here are a few valuable insights that will help you understand the significance of AI for client interactions:
- AI chatbots have saved businesses over 3 billion working hours each year.
- Companies miss out on $75 billion to $2 trillion due to low-quality customer support, which can be fixed with the help of AI.
- Almost 90% of your customers expect an immediate response when requesting support. Depending on your company’s scale, this may be only possible with a chatbot.
- 83% of businesses have expressed that AI has allowed them to assist more clients more efficiently.
And last but not least, AI virtual assistants can automate approximately 70% of your client requests. When you convert those requests into hours and money spent, you can see that AI integration with your business processes is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
AI’s Role in Making Informed Decisions
When you make decisions, you need to make sure they’re backed by hard data. As you can imagine, AI can be a valuable tool for achieving this. Utilizing artificial intelligence as a tool for decision-making can lead to numerous advantages, some of which are:
- Enhanced data accuracy: Because of using advanced algorithms and data science, accurate and objective insights can be achieved without human bias, providing you with better business analytics.
- Faster data processing: No matter how fast a human can work with data, no one can beat a machine in this regard. The amount of data an AI model can process is unparalleled. Automating data processing or at least some of the components in it can yield incredible results.
- Comprehensive data integration: AI can integrate and analyze data from multiple sources, providing a big-picture view of the business landscape. This allows for more informed decision-making by offering insights on trends, patterns, and correlations that might be missed when data is siloed or analyzed manually.
Final Thoughts
AI has evolved from a niche technology into a fundamental business tool, significantly reshaping the business landscape in the UAE, EU, and US. This growing adoption underscores AI's importance as a critical asset. Its widespread application across industries—from HR and QA to customer service—demonstrates its ability to enhance efficiency, improve customer experiences, and enable data-driven decision-making. As AI technology continues to advance, its integration into business processes will become increasingly essential for achieving operational excellence in today’s digital economy, leading to substantial cost savings and unprecedented efficiency.