Automation Applications in Business | Avrohom Gottheil | Engati Engage

Avrohom Gottheil is the founder of #AskTheCEO Media, where he helps businesses get heard over all the noise on social media, by translating their corporate messages into a language that people understand. Avrohom comes from a 20+ year career in Telecom, where he helped businesses around the world install and maintain their communication systems and contact centers.

He is a Top-ranked global expert in IoT, AI, and Cybersecurity, and a frequent speaker on leveraging technology to accelerate revenue growth. Listen to him talk about the latest in technology trends, tools, and best practices for IoT, AI, Cloud, Cybersecurity, and more, on the #AskTheCEO podcast.

This article will contain a quick summary of the discussion, but if you’d prefer listening to reading, here’s our Spotify podcast:

Summary of Interview on Automation Applications in Business with Avrohom Gottheil

We’ve summarized Avrohom’s answers to our questions in this section. But if you’d like to go through his answers in detail, we’ve embedded the YouTube video below this section.

How do you think small businesses can adopt Automation to stay running during the lockdowns?

Avrohom talks about the different categories of automation and which ones will be more useful for small businesses. He says that small businesses have a major advantage in the fact that they’re more agile and can adopt new technologies at a quicker pace. Many SaaS businesses are more geared towards smaller businesses.

The whole point of being in business is to serve our clients. AI can help in personalizing services and offerings for clients. This would help please these clients in a better manner.

He says chatbots are the way to go. Chatbots now have Artificial Intelligence, helping businesses to personalize their offerings.

Avrohom gives us an example of a company that makes coffee machines. This company connected chatbots to their coffee machines and the bots would remember the user’s preferences. All the user needed to do was send a message saying “Make me a coffee” and the bot would go into her calendar, seeing if she had multiple meeting lined up, go into her fitness tracker and see if she got insufficient sleep and then access her preferences to make her the perfect cup of coffee, just as she needs it to get through her day.

He talks about using bots that can judge a customers mood based on the tone of his voice and reply in a manner that is sensitive to the customer’s emotional state. Small businesses using such a bot would be able to keep their customers satisfied and delighted, even during a lockdown. They wouldn’t need to risk their employee’s health by making them go to work.

Ps. if the bot involves a live chat feature, the business could have their agents deal with the more complicated queries from the comfort of their homes.

What further digital transformations do you expect to see with the current situation of employees working from home?

He says that we’re going to see Work from Home becoming a common practice. Companies are going to save money on real estate thanks to this.

Employees working from home will have an influence in the digital transformations.

Since employees are working from home, businesses will downsize on their real estate and the real estate industry will get disrupted. It will become a more competitive industry and may start following a model similar to the SaaS model.

He has a client into Smart Co-working spaces that follows this SaaS kind of model. They go beyond simply renting offices. They combine AI and smart home technology to create personalized experiences for their customers. This client uses technology to create a complete experience according to your ambiance preferences. They go further to use AI to change the colour of the walls for branding purposes. They match the walls with your logo colors with the help of AI.

There’s also going to be a lot of digital transformations and innovation in biotechnology, robotics and automation to help protect our healthcare workers and deliver cures.

He speaks about telemedicine and robotics helping doctors remotely reach places and communities that don’t have access to proper healthcare.

Conferences and events will be experimenting with Augmented Reality to create virtual conference experiences. It would save the time, energy and money that attendees spend to attend conferences. They can attend multiple conferences from the comfort of their homes.

In a world full of noise, how should businesses leverage AI to make sure their marketing message is heard?

This is Avrohom’s specialty.

He says that everyone is leveraging automation, but we should pick the right place to leverage it. We have to be human, we have to bring humanity back into the mix. If you’re using a bot, give it an interesting personality. Make it exciting.

He talks about scheduling social media posts instead of wasting your time manually doing it. But when someone comments on your posts, don’t reply with a canned response.

Reply personally. Put the human Element back into automation.

“Automation is a tool that is to be leveraged in the right place and at the right time”

-Avrohom Gottheil

He says that marketing is all about humans collaborating with other humans.

What tech do you expect to see businesses adopting to make sure their customers are served and supported during the lockdowns?

Customers understand that businesses are stretched thin in terms of resources. But they’re glad if a chatbot can help them out. They’re ready to use a self-service model if they can get the support that they need.

Even teleconferences and the good old forward to cell phone technology will prove to be very useful. It let’s customer services agents work out of their living rooms instead of working in the call centres.

How can businesses leverage social media in the time of the on-going pandemic to sustain and build a concrete presence in the long run?

It is now more important than ever to leverage social media and put out content. Everyone is at home. They’re not seeing anyone face to face and they have the time to consume your content.

His rule of thumb about building a social media presence is to build trust by providing value instead of just pitching your product or service. Once you’ve built trust, you gain the right to make a pitch.

Talk about your potential customers’ pain, gain their attention and share solutions. Not just your own solutions, but general ones. And only after that should you start to pitch your services.

Give them value. Give them a gift!

Is there any other advice you would like to leave our audience with?

Be Human. It’s sounds simple, but it isn’t. When we’re under pressure, we want to take short cuts, but we have AI to do it better and faster.

To avoid falling prey to AI and instead become it’s master, leverage your humanity.

Your humanity will cut through the noise and shine bright like a lighthouse and bring your prospects to you. Embrace your humanity, because it is your greatest asset!

Leverage automation in the right places and use it to help humans make decisions. Humans have to work in collaboration with automation.

Get ahead

Avrohom believes that adopting chatbots will be a major advantage for all sorts of companies. It’s time for you to try one yourself. Get started with Engati for free today. No credit card required!

Automation Applications – Avrohom Gottheil’s video interview

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