SaaS startups, like any other startup, face enormous challenges in the initial idea validation & growth phase. They are, by nature, largely dependent on technology, so awareness of new trends is a must for success.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the services that a SaaS startup can provide and it is quickly becoming a part of everyday life. Millions of people use AI daily but only about 37 percent are aware that they are doing it.
You can find it in many areas, from email spam filters to virtual home assistants. If you have an iPhone, when you use Siri, you are using AI.
Businesses have begun to see the advantages of artificial intelligence especially when it comes to reducing running costs, saving time, and increasing efficiency. This has led to the integration of AI in business operations and activities.
The following are some of the areas of operations that have benefited from AI.
AI has the potential of creating fully automated businesses. Here is how a SaaS startup will look in the future with the integration of AI into its daily business operations as well as how SaaS startups are currently using AI.
The primary advantage of artificial intelligence is that it offers automation of tasks and services. This automation saves you a lot of time and lowers your business costs significantly.
In the future, most business operations will have AI integrated into them completely. In fact, workplace teams will rely on AI systems heavily to run these operations without continuous input from them.
By using AI, SaaS startups can channel their investment towards their core activities, reducing the costs that businesses incur when conducting vital and routine operations.
Unfortunately, however, most firms have still yet to appreciate the potential impact of AI on their activities. Here are some of the organizational departments that can benefit from its application.
Statistics indicate that sales teams spend 80 percent of their time qualifying potential leads while only 20 percent of their time is dedicated to closing promising leads. This is because qualifying a lead requires a lot of vetting and research into the leads to identify the ones that could lead to a sale from the ones that would not.
However, with AI, businesses can automate the qualifying process and conclusive checks can be conducted on leads using AI. This has the advantage of providing the sales team with more time to focus on following up and closing the leads, making the sales team more productive.
Businesses should then be able to see their profits increase because sales teams will dedicate most of their working hours to closing leads that have been accurately qualified. This will definitely lead to increased sales.
By using virtual assistants, marketing teams can collect accurate data on consumer trends and behaviors. They can also focus on providing services and products that consumers want.
AI can help marketers get accurate data on how effective their campaigns are. By assessing the information obtained by AI, marketing teams can then develop more effective and targeted campaigns.
AI can transform marketing because accurate data will influence operations conducted by marketing teams. Consequently, using information that is more accurate will lead to better decisions, resulting in an increase in the profits made by the business.
Another way that AI helps marketing teams is with AI story generators, with which teams can create effective brand narratives in a matter of seconds.
The overall effect of AI on marketing is bound to be the development of better and more effective marketing strategies.
AI chatbots will also likely revolutionize traditional customer services that currently require a human being to respond to customer concerns and questions.
Chatbots will significantly reduce the cost of providing customer services, which is conventionally a very costly operation for SaaS startups.
AI is currently in use and there are different AI-powered applications like ChatGPT that can benefit your SaaS startup today by helping you save time and money in daily operations. The applications are aimed at reducing the tedious tasks in normal day-to-day operations of businesses by automating them.
One such tool is Bookmark, an AI-powered top rated website builder that eliminates the complexities and challenges business people face when they are building and maintaining their company websites. The platform provides businesses with the opportunity to create unique websites within just a few minutes.
This technology has a major impact on any SaaS startup budget. With the cost of making a professional-looking business website reduced to be almost negligible, startups can focus their expenditure on other aspects of the business.
Once you have created a business website, you can use other AI tools such as Amazon Echo to provide you with virtual assistant services. The virtual assistant will help you conduct research finding all the information you need to guide you through making better business decisions at work.
Virtual assistants, unlike human assistants, will be available all the time. They are capable of providing more accurate information than their human counterparts. This AI technology is also much cheaper and more reliable to use compared to humans who create overhead costs through salaries and benefits and are not always available.
Managers can also better coordinate with their teams and any communication can easily be retrieved later on as it is stored within the application.
The future is bright for AI and businesses should begin to adopt and integrate the available technology in their everyday operations. The technology has been proven to reduce the cost of doing business while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations.
Artificial intelligence should not be viewed as a replacement to human resources but rather as a system that assists humans by helping them dedicate themselves to tasks that cannot be automated, thereby making them more productive.
For SaaS startups, AI offers them an avenue to reduce the startup costs that can sometimes affect the setting up process and eventually negatively affect the success of the small business.