Machine Learning

If are a follower of the tech industry then you must have heard of the term machine learning. It is arguably one of the most famous terminologies being used in the tech industry. Truth being said, it is truly a fascinating field. Machine learning has revolutionized many fields of studies and helped scientists advanced in multiple fields has been really slow.

This all fascinating, undoubtedly, but the academic achievements of this discipline is not what this article is about. While this aspect of the field is attracting various scientists and big tech firms to it, we will be discussing something else entirely. As aforementioned, we now know how impactful machine learning can be and what it can do for academia. But, what can do for businesses, particularly SMBs?

Let us draw a picture. If you are an entrepreneur that is starting out in whatever industry out there or you already have an established business, how can you harness the power of machine learning to dominate your niche or stand out from your competition and increase your market share and survive to see another day.

In this article, we will introduce use cases in which machine learning is drastically changing the way businesses are operating in their respective industries. It is important to keep in mind that while these strategies may have worked for some companies, it may not be the same case for you. Let this article serve as an inspiration source for your features endeavours regarding machine learning. Let’s dive right in.

Machine Learning: The Accelerated Wave Of Adoption

Since machine learning has become the favourite, or one of the favourite topics to talk about in the tech industry, a lot wanted to get a hold on while they still could, but if only it was that easy.

As it was mentioned earlier, machine learning is being used in research and this is not a coincidence. Here’s a swift explanation. Machine learning, roughly speaking, is the use and study of statistical models and methods as well as algorithms used and understood by machines (computers) in order to perform a task without being told.

This is almost ideal for research as it is heavily people-centric and very repetitive which is what machine learning is made for. As for business implementations, despite that most of them are still in their early stages of development, we can see a race between companies to harness this technology as its benefits become more clear and evident with the day. Here’s the catch though, online huge software companies have the funds as well as the size to hire the proper expertise in this field. Other companies, whilst immensely interested, struggle to attract the right talent.

Regardless of this fact, we can still investigate in which business-related fields machine learning can be applied. It is also important, at this point, to differentiate between AI and ML, so there is no confusion to be caused later.

Machine Learning In Supply Chain Management:

Machine learning is a powerful forecasting tool and supply chain, at its gist, is all about forecasting… You connect the dots at this point. Machine is being implemented by multiple companies to forecast the demand for their products, new releases, and in helping better understanding as well as unravelling the different factors that might affect this demand. That being said, companies that constantly need to manage their inventory are implementing machine learning to actively monitor their inventory levels in order to reduce inventory management costs and increase inventory turnovers. So if you are a small E-commerce company that is having a hard time managing its inventory or forecast the demand of its products based on the various market factors, machine learning may be the solution you have been looking for.

Machine Learning in Internet of Things:

If there is one thing you can never have enough of when dealing with machine learning is, as you guessed, data. And what a perfect situation this is. Internet of Things or as commonly referred to as IoT is one of the biggest data generating fields. All of us are data generator including our devices and daily processes. When it comes to businesses, the terminology changes slightly. We are in the presence of Industrial IoT. The businesses’ devices and operating processes generate vast amount of data that can be used for various purposes such as accident prevention and production processes optimization. This is, of course, mere examples but the sky's the limit with the right training data set.

Machine Learning in Personalization:

Personalization shows a customer different offers, providing a personalized experience and therefore increasing chances that the customer will convert. Companies use machine learning algorithms to provide personalized user experiences and later on measure their responsiveness and other key performance indicators to see which customers are most likely to convert and which are more likely to leave a service or a product. This can be particularly useful for service-providing companies as they can effectively study the conversion cycle of their customers and detect which parts or levels of the funnel are broken and see how they can fix the issue.

Machine Learning: What To Look As An SMB

As an SMD, you might now have the money or the size to hire the right talent for machine learning which is perfectly understandable. However, this should not stop you. While major implementations of machine learning still requires the right team, minor one are still up for your grasp. Here’s what to look for when you want to implement machine learning in your company:

Which process is human-intensive?

Which process is highly repeatable?

Which process needs human to review a large amount of data?

After answering those questions, make sure that you can extract enough data for the machine learning algorithms to be implemented and prepare well structured and clean data sets to train your algorithms to deliver the most relevant and pertinent results. After implementing machine learning, it is important to always keep improving your model as well as measure the ROI to know if this decision was worth it or not!

Finally, to sum up, machine learning provides a better understanding of how your internal businesses work. Machine learning experts or you as a user of machine learning can make better decisions, which is the ultimate goal of every business. So, identify your data-centric process and start implementing ML.