In a recent interview with Lionbridge AI, Data Scientist Dr. Iain Brown said that we are now all part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. One of the most prominent technologies shaping this revolution is artificial intelligence.

Unbeknownst to many outside of the machine learning field, AI models power a lot of the modern technology that we use everyday. Thanks to AI, we have search engines like Google that automatically tailor themselves to our own personal search histories and shopping preferences. Soon, autonomous vehicles powered by numerous AI algorithms will change the way we travel. Ultimately, AI will change many aspects of the way we live.

From streamlining customer service workflows to examining data for strategic planning, AI technology can be used to improve almost any business model. In the dog-eat-dog world of business, every edge you can get over your competition is crucial to remain on top. To put it simply: if your competitors are utilizing AI tech, you should’ve been doing it first. Luckily, it is never too late to start implementing AI into your company.

Here are just 5 ways every business can start implementing AI into their framework.

1. Chatbots for Customer Service

One of the most simple ways to use AI in your business is to create a chatbot to streamline customer service inquiries. All customer service inquiries generally boil down to three main queries: this isn’t working, what does this mean, and how do I do this?

While outlier situations exist, the majority of service tickets will involve resolutions, explanations, and walkthroughs. Because most resolutions are formulaic (i.e. when x happens tell the customer to do y), customer service reps are trained like machines. Representatives are trained to memorize policies, understand customer inquiries, and act from a list of predetermined responses. Instead of training 100 people to act like a machine, an effective chatbot allows you to handle all customer inquiries autonomously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

To build a chatbot, you’ll need two things: someone to build it (AI engineer), and chatbot training data. While your chatbot will need to be trained on your company’s data in order to respond to queries, it first needs to learn how to understand that data in the first place. To acquire chatbot training data, you can either learn how to create and annotate the data yourself or outsource your training data tasks. Many of the world’s largest tech companies outsource chatbot training data creation and annotation to maximize efficiency.

2. Improve User Experience with Search Relevance

Companies like Google, Netflix, and Amazon are examples of how good search engines can lead to a thriving business. For ecommerce companies in particular, the most important element of your website is the search engine. Usually the search bar on your site is the first element a user will interact with. Thus, it is also the first interaction a user has with your company. The search engine is what tells potential clients and customers whether or not you have what they are looking for.

Search relevance is the ability for a user to quickly and easily find what they are looking for on your site. By building a strong search engine that provides intuitive related results you create the equivalent of a good sales rep that keeps customers and clients on your site. To help you create the perfect search engine, you can use search evaluation services to test and evaluate your search results based on relevancy and appeal.

3. Sentiment Analysis to Gauge Customer Opinions

Sentiment analysis is the process of gauging the emotion or opinion within a body of text. Some studies have shown that there is a correlation between the sentiment of social media posts and stock market fluctuations. Using sentiment analysis on user-generated content about your company can help you gauge customer opinions about your products or services, helping improve your market strategy.

With hundreds to thousands of user reviews, social media posts, and blog comments, it can be almost impossible for human workers to manually read and analyze all of that data. Using AI to build an automatic sentiment classifier can allow you to understand the sentiment of large quantities of user-generated content quickly and at scale.

4. Automated Content Moderation

Websites like Yelp or Instagram which allow the publishing of user-generated content have a duty to censor sensitive material and maintain a certain standard of quality. As well, for companies with a large following, creating a safe and positive online community is pinnacle to maintaining a professional brand image.

Whether it be on your own website or social media accounts, moderating user-generated content can be incredibly time-consuming depending on the type and quantity of the content. Many companies have switched to automated content moderation solutions to help alleviate their workload and maintain a positive online image.

5. Text Summarization for Products, Meetings, and Reports

The phrase TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) exists for a reason: most people don’t have time to read pages upon pages of text. Instead, we often read summarizations of things to get a general idea and determine whether or not we would like to engage the content further.

There are many practical applications of text summarization in our everyday lives. Book retailers like Barnes and Noble use text summarization to provide customers with book overviews. Ecommerce sites like Amazon give succinct, yet enticing, product descriptions on almost every product page.

In the backend, automated text summarization models can improve productivity and efficiency in almost every business when implemented correctly. Don’t have time to sit through hours upon hours of meetings and conference calls? Voice-to-text programs combined with text summarization models could provide you with a complete, succinct report containing the most important points of every meeting you missed. Need to read a 20-page report or case study one hour before a call with an important client? A well-built text summarization model could condense that report into an easily-digestible overview.

The applications of text and content summarization models have countless applications in business. Use them properly and you could save your employees a lot of time while increasing efficiency and productivity.

These are just five ways you could start implementing AI into your business today. With constant breakthroughs in machine learning, there will soon be more and more AI solutions to help your business grow. Get ahead of your competition and start planning your AI strategy now.