3 AI and Analytics Solutions Startups and SMEs Should Use Right Now

The recent rapid pace of development in artificial intelligence (AI) technology and data analytics has changed the ways that many of today's biggest companies do business. From Amazon's mastery of consumer preferences to Netflix's uncanny ability to know what users will want to watch even before they know it themselves, there's virtually no market that's been left untouched by the growth of those technologies. For startups and SMEs, however, the pace of adoption of AI and analytics has been slower than many would've hoped (except, of course, within AI-centric startups themselves).

Some of that is due to the relative complexity of some of today's leading-edge AI and analytics solutions, but for the most part, there's a much simpler explanation: it's still really difficult to tell how the technologies fit into the operational and strategic picture for most organizations. That doesn't mean, however, that there aren't plenty of game-changing ways that small companies and startups could be leveraging AI and analytics to advance their own causes.

To help make that clear, and to assist those businesses looking to make AI and data analytics a core part of their operations going forward, here's a look at three inexpensive AI and analytics solutions that SMEs and startups could be using to great effect right now.

For startups and SMEs, succeeding in a market means knowing what to do and exactly when to do it. To do that, however, takes a broad understanding of the market itself (whatever it may be) including every move the competition makes on a minute-to-minute basis. In the past, this required a massive investment in both time and labor and even then was more of an art than a science. Today, any business can turn the job over to an AI platform and get far better, more comprehensive results. That's just what Crayon does – it acts as a market intelligence aggregator with an AI-powered business intelligence (BI) function. The result is akin to having a full-blown in-house BI suite with a team of data experts to get the most out of it. For startups and SMEs, it can be a critical advantage that lets them beat competitors to the punch, without the expense involved in building internal BI capabilities.

It's one thing to bring sophisticated BI tools into an organization's decision making and strategic processes, but it's quite another to make them accessible enough for small, non-technical teams to make good use of them. Enter Crystal, and AI-powered digital assistant that can take existing business data and extract meaningful insights out of it. It also provides a conversational interface, which makes it a kind of Swiss Army knife for businesses with little to no existing data infrastructure. For example, users can ask Crystal simple strategic questions and get direct, evidence-based answers, such as the best time to send a marketing email, or what the biggest causes of product production slowdowns have been. Best of all, there's virtually no learning curve involved, so it's an almost plug-and-play AI solution.

One of the best current uses for AI and data analytics by startups and SMEs is within their marketing operations. It can be used for everything from analyzing website data to conducting complex A/B testing on digital platforms. It's most valuable use, though, might be in eliminating duplicative or low-value work when it comes to content marketing strategies. That's where AI platform Concured comes in. It lets marketers know what types of content to create to drive the highest engagement possible from prospective customers, and provides high-level ROI tracking to drive consistent results. With it, almost any startup or SME can simply learn the basics of blogging for beginners, and then trust Concured to do the rest.

Put together, the addition of the AI and analytics tools mentioned here can make for a sophisticated data arsenal for any startup or SME. They also serve as an object lesson in the fact that there is no shortage of high-tech tools already available to the SME market. If nothing else, these tools and others can serve as a kind of onramp for organizations that are looking to become data-centric and hop aboard the AI and analytics train. With so many companies already achieving a great deal of success by doing so, it would be absurd for any business not to take advantage of them.