Why yes. But of course. One has to get something out of this Faustian bargain, right? How about cost savings and oodles of workplace efficiencies to the point where entire sectors of the job market become obsolete. Sound good? Now sign on the dotted line.

But are humans really willing to usher in an age of super intelligent AI with all of its accompanying unknowns, dangers and risks - including the possible annihilation of our entire species - in hopes that AI will improve the workloads and bottom lines for at least a few of us?‍

It looks that way.

According to Next Move Strategy Consulting, the “global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Market size was valued at USD 95.60 billion in 2021 and is predicted to reach nearly 2 trillion USD by 2030, registering a compound annual growth rate of 32.9% between 2022 to 2030.” AI’s impact will be profoundly felt in a variety of industries including research, marketing, software development, healthcare, transportation, supply chains, manufacturing, and many others. To that end, here are some areas where AI can lend a helping (artificial) hand with your small or medium-sized business’s design and strategy operations.

Data Analysis. AI is good and only getting better at analyzing vast troves of data, making it easier to extract key insights that can inform design and strategy decisions. By leveraging machine learning, businesses can uncover trends, patterns, and correlations in their data, allowing them to better comprehend market dynamics, customer preferences, and emerging trends. This data-driven approach enables businesses of all shapes and sizes to make informed decisions about what appeals to their target audiences and what doesn’t.

Content Creation. When it comes to creating content for your SMB, generative AI language models like Chat GPT-4 can write blog posts, articles, ad copy or newsletters about practically anything in mere seconds, seriously amping up your marketing department’s content generating capabilities. But while AI-generated content can be useful for idea generation, inspiration or early drafts of content, skilled workers should still guide the overall content creation process in order to ensure content quality, continuity, relevance, and overall accuracy. AI’s have been known to hallucinate, after all, and say things that aren’t true.

Personalization / Customization. AI can already facilitate personalized experiences and customization with regards to strategy and design. This capability will only improve in the coming years as businesses gather more data on customers including their behaviors, preferences and past interactions with their service or products. This information will be used to further improve and disseminate customized marketing messages, optimized content or to help create personalized user experiences, making it easier to deliver satisfying customer interactions and product engagement in a repeatable and scalable way.

Design Automation. Even creative jobs—like digital or product design—have moments of monotony. Thankfully, AI tools can lend a serious assist to the uninspired by automating tedious tasks. AI can generate design variations, or an array of prototypes or mockups based on a set of defined design parameters. Additionally, artificial engineering can help with the simple but sometimes tedious tasks of resizing hundreds or thousands of images, optimizing layouts, or generating snippets of code. All of this frees up the designer to work on more complex, creative, and rewarding tasks.

User Experience. AI can improve and enhance user experiences by analyzing interactions, behaviors, and feedback as it pertains to the user’s needs, pain points, and overall levels of satisfaction. This information can then be used to better inform the design process for the next release of the product, tool, or service, enabling businesses to correct errors, fix bugs, add features, and significantly improve the overall user experience.

Whatever the future holds, artificially intelligent systems are likely here to stay. Just how smart they’ll get or how disruptive they’ll become to human civilization remains to be seen. But in the short term, there’s no question that utilizing AI for your small or medium-sized business, whatever sector it’s in, will likely result in significant cost savings and stunning new efficiencies as you unleash the power of AI to achieve things that have never been possible before, or to accomplish things that used to require human beings.

Where do you stand on AI? How do you see it making or breaking your business today and beyond? Send your thoughts and feedback to julianne@maticdigital.com.

Author: Jesse Chatham / founder of JUMO Creative / for Matic Digital

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