It’s getting adopted at a rapid pace; self-driving cars, pedestrian crossings that fine jaywalkers almost immediately after their misdemeanour, and amazon packages delivered by drone. Artificial intelligence is intercepting our everyday lives. These are examples of AI that help streamline the operations of huge organisations and government authorities. But what about the many many examples of AI that is helping us in the more mundane tasks? The stuff that takes up more of our time as website owners?
In this blog, we’ll give you what you need to know about AI and some of the best examples of how it’s helping site owners across the globe.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence, despite what Hollywood films would have you think, is actually really rather helpful. In fact, it’s something we unknowingly encounter and benefit from on a daily basis. Google the definition of “Artificial Intelligence” and you’ll receive the following:
“The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
Although that wasn’t a particularly complicated query, by using the Google search tool we’ve just used, we’ve actually just benefited from an artificial intelligence system. But it’s no secret that Google relies on AI to assist with and improve its search engine, and they’re not the only big organisations to take advantage of it. Amazon uses machine learning systems to recommend products. Paypal uses AI to enhance its risk management and fraud detection capabilities. Facebook attempts to detect hate speech and fake news via machine learning.
You might be thinking that, of course, when you’re a company of that size, you’ve got plenty of opportunities to invest in AI. But it’s for good reason that they have invested so heavily in it. Due to its potential, it was inevitable that these large organisations would be pretty heavily involved in AI, especially when AI is projected to contribute “15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030”. But AI isn’t just for the big players. Thanks to open source platforms like WordPress, you don’t need to be a large organisation to benefit from AI.
AI & WordPress
As a WordPress site owner, you may well be familiar with Akismet, especially since it comes as standard with all fresh WordPress downloads. But in case you’re not familiar, this highly useful plugin helps filter site comments for spam, reducing the intolerable amount of time spent wading through the irrelevant or downright inappropriate ads that are trying to trick their way onto your website.
Essentially, Akismet uses machine learning to intelligently weed out the bad stuff. As the spam evolves so does the detection tools, enabling you to win the ever annoying and actually quite costly game of cat and mouse, meaning you rarely have to get involved yourself.
Chatbots
Another common form of AI that could greatly benefit your website is chatbots. A chatbot can be great for handling simple queries or redirecting a potential lead to a real person for those more complicated enquiries. You can pre-program them with on-brand responses and answers to common FAQS, creating a positive user experience without you having to touch a button. Within eCommerce businesses, they help free up your human customer service agent’s time by consuming those more mundane and simple queries. Your customer gets the answers they want in a timely fashion, and you get to sit back and enjoy the brand loyalty and customer satisfaction grow effortlessly.
Who is using AI?
Mailchimp, known for offering up a sophisticated email campaign editing suite, now provides AI services to small businesses. Their comprehensive suite offers useful tools like Product Recommendations and Forecasting Tools for behavioural targeting of potential customers.
Hubspot’s AI systems, on the other hand, is helping you keep your CRM up to date (and so much more.) Their powerful AI tool will clean-up your data for you by merging duplicate contacts, detecting typos and nicknames, harvesting names from live chat, and that’s just for starters. It even makes SEO suggestions by scanning your site’s content then recommending topics you can write about.
When it comes to content-heavy sites, many are taking full advantage of Grammarly’s AI system. The ideal partner for editors, it’s a machine learning and natural language processing capabilities tool that searches even the lengthiest posts to highlight, and correct, grammatical errors. The super handy tool even uses AI to determine the tone of the piece, it’s clarity and overall delivery.
Can smaller businesses take advantage of AI?
These two big contenders in the AI world are some of the many, many examples of who and how organisations are using AI to improve user experiences, marketing activities, and even your everyday admin.
But it’s important to note that anyone can take advantage of AI. As a site owner, you can benefit from AI-assisted tools to help streamline your everyday operations, right now. AI is already working to make your website’s daily operations more streamlined without the need for any new complicated technologies. It’s all there behind that WordPress admin interface, and you can add more AI integrations into your site dependent on what you’re looking to achieve. Not sure which plugins to use? Head over to WPBeginner for their top-rated AI integrations.
Looking for help with your WordPress website? Or have some questions about PHP? Let’s have a chat over coffee.
