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Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Smaller Businesses

Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Smaller Businesses

Reflecting on the Opal Group’s Emerging Managers Summit

By Michael McAdams, President, Pasadena Private Lending

As credit people, and for that matter, as many of our readers are small to medium sized business owners with limited tolerance for unproductive investments of our time and money, we are all often ridiculed for being slow to embrace technology, especially groundbreaking technology.

Our concerns range from “computers taking over the world” to “what if it doesn’t work?” And, to “what if we invest and underlying tech changes in six months and we have to upgrade to stay current?” And then there is “what if it works and I can replace half my loyal staff… and because of cost effectiveness… I actually must let my loyal staff go?”

At a recent Opal Conference in Atlanta, I attended a panel and heard some fascinating viewpoints. While the presenters where focused on the problems and opportunities of other non-bank lenders like PPL, the theme was the same for all businesses.

1. Focus your AI efforts first to locate, sort, and reach out to your best prospective customers: reduce the cost, time, and wasted efforts of unproductive sales efforts through an intelligent CRM that increases productivity and profits. Used properly, an AI-driven CRM can also keep tabs on customers and their satisfaction with all aspects of their interaction with your firm.

2. Companies with large numbers of potential prospects, i.e. retail and consumers or distributors are ideal candidates: the more the products’ or services’ benefits can be described in a simplified story to more similar prospects, the more efficient AI can be. Use AI to look for, sift through, and focus your human efforts on prospects who have the best chance of becoming customers.

3. Use AI where brainpower can truly provide advantages over two-dimensional or spreadsheet-driven analytics: AI can access data to see relationships between three and four or more variables where simple sales analysis on two-dimensional graphs can’t. For example, your product sells well to 15-24 year olds, but to males or females? Or to couples or groups? And at what time of day, and what are they doing before or after they stop by your establishment?

4. AI can make marketing more contemporary… drawing from the most immediate internet trends. Asking an AI program to draft a spur-of-the-moment advertisement can give your product a fresh appeal to cutting edge consumers. You can also ask to “tone down” the contemporary talk for more mainstream clients.

5. AI can help track your competitors’ product and marketing moves to keep you current, if not ahead. A daily AI summary of news on your industry and key competitor announcements is a good way to monitor your competition.

For us at PPL, Rajiv Bhat, CEO of the interestingly named firm Martini AI, provided an intriguing insight: “Corporate credit is at present harder to address with AI than to understand quantum mechanics.” That is, the multiple of changing variables needed for assessing and determining credit to business borrowers code to be cracked. With that said, we routinely use AI to assist us with industry analyses and in summarizing long reports as well in our prospect outreach… through LinkedIn, our website, and our monthly Private Credits Insights newsletter.

How have you and your business leveraged AI? We invite you to share your findings with us by contacting us.