Copyright ©2025 | SME South Africa | Designed and Developed by Adclickafrica
Copyright ©2025 | SME South Africa
Updated on Jan 31, 2025
Recently, the news has been focused on artificial intelligence (AI). More specifically, all the talk has been around DeepSeek, a China-based AI company. The company released a new AI assistant rivalling OpenAI’s ChatGPT, highlighting the many advancements in this field.
AI has been the focus of many people and businesses because of how the technology has automated processes and its possible harm to the human race. However, when discussing AI, we have to look at how it can help businesses, especially those who do not have much funding.
AI is a type of technology that enables computers and machines to perform a variety of advanced functions. These include seeing, understanding and translating spoken and written language, analysing data and making recommendations. The technology can also read and create code (computer language).
An application that was built or integrated with AI can understand and respond to human language. It can learn from new information and experience (historical data). AI machines can act independently much like self-driving cars.
In South Africa, the AI market is continuously growing and is projected to reach $ 1,2 billion this year. The country’s AI market growth is driven by the increasing adoption of digital technologies, rising awareness of health issues access to healthcare and the convenience of online services.
Other factors contributing to the market growth include AI robotics, autonomous and sensor technology, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI (Gen-AI). As the AI market continues to grow in South Africa, those who have not yet started to integrate it into their businesses might be left behind.
In this guide, we look at AI for businesses and how you can get AI integrated into your business processes.
AI-powered automation uses actionable intelligence to deliver IT and business operations with speed, lower cost and better user experience. AI automation uses artificial intelligence techniques such as ML algorithms, NLP and computer vision to process and learn from large datasets.
Once an AI application processes large datasets and builds an AI model, it can direct intelligent decision-making based on what it learned from the historical data.
Robotic process automation is a type of business process automation that allows anyone to define a set of instructions for a robot or ‘bot’ to perform. The software technology makes it easy to build, deploy and manage the robots that emulate human actions and interact with digital systems and software.
For businesses, RPA helps streamline workflows. This helps businesses become more flexible and profitable and increases employee engagement and productivity. Some of the other benefits of RPA for businesses include:
To seamlessly implement a technology like RPA into your business, consider the following:
1. Find What Needs to be Automated
Before jumping in and integrating RPA into your business, you need to identify what needs to be automated. This will ensure that you don’t waste money on things that don’t need to be automated and ensure you get a good return on investment (ROI).
2. Get Company-wide Buy-in
To ensure that your RPA integration goes smoothly, you have to get your employees on board. Provide them with educational material and programmes to help them understand the technology better and ensure seamless integration.
3. Choose the Right RPA for Your Business
The tools or software you use for automation are just as important as the processes you automate. The right RPA software must align with how your business works, integrate easily and save you cost. Do proper research to determine which software works for your business.
4. Create an Implementation Plan
Create a comprehensive RPA implementation plan. In this plan, you should outline how and when you will integrate the tech into your company. Additionally, this plan should include factors such as:
5. Conduct Testing
In this step, you will test your chosen RPA software. You can do this by putting the automated solution into an everyday process and see how it works and if it works as you want. Alternatively, you can run your automation in a testing environment and ask people for feedback.
6. Rollout Your Solution
If everything goes well in the testing stage and you receive positive feedback, you can begin to roll out your RPA. This means you will integrate it into the identified processes and monitor how it works so you can make changes quickly (if needed).
RPAs are just one example of artificial intelligence automation when it comes to business workflows. For businesses who might not be looking at an advanced technology like RPA, there are other workflow automation tools you can leverage.
When people talk about artificial intelligence and how amazing it is, it’s mostly because the technology automates a lot of mundane, repetitive tasks. This is especially important for businesses. One process that has been elevated because of AI is workflow.
AI workflow optimisation involves using algorithms and AI technologies to automate and enhance business processes. These workflows can enhance tasks such as inventory management and customer support. Also, the technology can boost efficiency, reduce costs and improve accuracy.
If you are seeking to automate parts or all of your business workflows, here are some AI tools you should consider:
These tools are just a few of the many AI tools designed to help businesses automate and optimise their workflow.
AI in supply chain and logistics performs a variety of tasks. These include real-time tracking, insights reporting and optimisation of supply chain processes. The technology can process vast amounts of data for prediction and performing complex tasks. This helps to improve the overall decision-making and operational efficiency of the supply chain sector.
For anyone running a logistics or supply chain business in 2025, you need to consider artificial intelligence to help increase your business resiliency. Some strategies for optimising your supply chain with AI are:
1. Adopt Predictive Analysis
AI tools are able to analyse large sets of data including historical data and predict future challenges like demand surges or supply disruptions. Using AI can help you be more proactive in planning and resource allocation. This saves you a lot of time and consequently a lot of money.
2. Rely on Automation
Using AI will automate and streamline various mundane tasks like order processing, inventory management and quality assurancechecks. This improves overall speed and accuracy.
3. Real-time Tracking
Use AI systems to get real-time updates on your shipments and inventory. This significantly reduces any delays and ensures your customers get their goods in time, increasing customer satisfaction.
4. Train or Learn on AI
You have to equip your staff with the right training and skills on how to use AI in supply chain management. Properly training them ensures easy adoption and effective use of the AI tools.
5. Integrate AI with the Internet of Things (IoT)
IoT is a network of interrelated devices that connect and exchange data with other IoT devices and the cloud. For example, thermostats and kitchen appliances, fitness-tracking watches and self-driving cars.
Combining AI with IoT devices can enhance data collection and provide insights into your equipment health, shipment conditions, delivery routes and more.
Using these strategies you can easily integrate AI automation into your supply chain processes. This will give you enough time to focus on important stuff like client meetings and save you money on fuel, equipment maintenance and petrol consumption.
AI analytics uses machine learning (ML) to discover insights. Artificial intelligence in analytics only requires human input at the first instance, once the ML algorithms are fed training data, they can learn how to spot patterns and analyse data.
Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistics and ML to streamline operations, boost revenues and mitigate risk for any business operating in any industry. In some industries, augmented analytics are used. These machines use big data and machine learning for predicting.
Here are some of the key data points that businesses should track to better their strategies and grow their business for success.
1. Financials
Using AI to analyse your financial metrics. This helps you understand the financial health of your business including revenue, profit margins, expenses and cash flow.
2. Customer Data
AI-powered analytics tools are designed to help businesses understand their customers and drive sales. The tools track important data such as customer demographics, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value and customer retention rate.
3. Sales
Use AI-powered tools to evaluate your sales performance and identify key sales trends. The tools also monitor sales growth rate, average transaction value, sales conversion rate and sales by channel.
4. Marketing
AI analytics tools are vital in monitoring metrics of website traffic, conversion rates, return on investment (ROI) and social media engagement. This helps you create more tailored marketing campaigns for your customers.
5. Business Operations
Using predictive analysis tools is important for ensuring efficiency and productivity within your business. AI-powered analytics tools can monitor key metrics such as inventory turnover, employee performance, project completion rates and customer support metrics.
Here are some of the top artificial intelligence tools you can use for real-time business data analysis.
These tools can provide you with insights that eventually will inform the decisions you make in your business. Some of them (Tableau and IBM Cognos Analytics) are more complex than others, depending on your knowledge of data analysis.
AI in financial forecasting is the use of algorithms and ML to analyse large amounts of data very quickly. This enhances the accuracy of the forecasts and includes a range of variables such as market trends, consumer behaviour and economic indicators.
For small businesses, AI tools can help predict what financial needs and pitfalls you might have during the year. This will help you make more informed decisions on spending and funding.
Here are some tools you can explore to help you with financial forecasting.
These tools can really help you play your year better when it comes to your business finances.
Tech companies have changed the way businesses approach customer engagement and experience. These companies are working to make it easier for their customers because they understand that the customer is needed in order for the product to succeed.
AI for customer experience uses intelligent technology to build fast and personalised customer interactions. There are a range of technologies for enhancing customer experience such as chatbots, customer engagement tools and e-commerce technology (digital payments).
Benefits of AI Chatbots for Customer Service Teams
A chatbot is a computer programme that simulates conversation with human end users. Chatbots often use natural language processing (NLP) and gen-AI to automate responses.
There are many benefits to using a chatbot on your business website. Some of those benefits are:
These benefits only scrape the surface when it comes to chatbots. When used right the technology can enhance the overall performance of the business and revenue.
E-commerce is one of many technologies that has significantly impacted businesses and how they operate. For many, it comes with additional revenue streams (food delivery apps and online marketplaces) and for others, it has meant more competition.
The following are ways in which you can use AI to personalise marketing on your online store.
1. Personalise the Landing Page
Using artificial intelligence, you can segment your customers to ensure your landing page content is relevant to each customer.
2. Personalise Product Recommendations
Having an AI shopping assistant on your website is vital. The AI tool can look through past customer buying data such as searches, clicks and purchases to recommend the most relevant items.
3. Smart Search
AI tools can identify online and offline data patterns like personalised product recommendations to understand the intent of your customers. ML algorithms use that analysis to make the data contextual. For example, if someone searches for ‘football scarves’ the machine can predict that they are attending a football game soon.
4. Logistics and Forecasting
Artificial intelligence can help you manage the complexities of your business operations by optimising warehouse processes and supply chain management. The AI tool can pull data from various sources within your business to make forecasts.
The customer journey does not end with just buying. AI tools can ensure that you provide continuous support through the entire customer journey.
AI sentiment analysis helps you decode the human emotion in text. This enables you to connect with customers on a more emotional level and find out what they like and dislike about your brand.
Artificial intelligence feedback analysis uses its ML and NLP features to assess customer feedback via support tickets, reviews, comments and more. From there the AI tool can identify negative and positive trends. You can use that analysis to improve overall customer experience.
Copyright ©2025 | SME South Africa | Designed and Developed by Adclickafrica
Copyright ©2025 | SME South Africa