Robot at drive-thru

Building the Best Drive-Through – Four Ways AI and ML Are Reinventing Business

When people who aren’t much involved with AI read about it, there’s often a lot of confusion. You can look at the technical ways that people set up artificial intelligence and machine learning projects, and not really understand how it practically helps business. Yes, you have smart computers and stuff – but what do enterprise leaders do with this kind of tool? Here are four great examples of using AI and ML to revolutionize business today.

The Drive-Through Example

Suppose you have a bricks and mortar retail establishment – like a fast food chain. You have people coming in and out all day, every day, as long as it’s open. They are in their cars passing through a drive-through line (or two or three drive-throughs in some of these modern stores.) That ever-moving flow of traffic represents a massive data stream that can be modeled, dissected and analyzed in all sorts of interesting ways. So that’s what some AI systems do – they take in the raw data, how many cars, where the cars are, how many people in each car, and maybe even identifying characteristics for return customers. Say you have customer loyalty fobs that people hang in their vehicles. You could track those, too, theoretically. All of this data gets made into insights – when do people order which foods? How fast are people being served, and how does that affect orders? Anything that business leaders want to know is at their fingertips.

Sit-Down Restaurants

We can apply the same principle to fancier sit-down restaurant establishments. The food is different, but in some ways, the business model is much the same. Business leaders want those insights from the raw data – they want to know how groups of people come into the restaurant, and how that might affect their purchasing decisions. Maybe the restaurant has farm-to-table retail cases near the front, and they want to sell more of this product. Maybe they want to see how the restaurant fills up so they can utilize the best space well. They can get all sorts of insights for customer satisfaction, better revenues and everything else through the power of tracking with AI and ML programs.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

In e-commerce, one of the biggest pain points for businesses is where customers abandon their shopping carts halfway through the process. There’s a lot of capricious buying on the Internet – some of it happens, and some of it doesn’t. People may click in and put something in a checkout cart and then just forget about it and move on. Brand-new AI and ML product programs alert businesses when this happens, and help them to repurpose those abandoned shopping cart deals. They might reach out with targeted coupons or some other way to entice those customers back into a sale. All of this enhances the sales funnel and moves the ball forward.

Product Development

Companies that can leverage AI/ML can more effectively change their business models to fit what their customers want. They can workshop features and functionality and new ideas to figure out what’s going to serve them best as they put together product or service strategies. All of this is tremendously exciting for business. Let WebSubstance help you to cash in on some of these new business practices and get better conversion and better deal-making processes into your business model.

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