Artificial intelligence is the must-have technology for every business owner in 2024. By leveraging AI technologies, SMEs can achieve performance and innovation boosts across multiple areas of the business, from financial management to sales and marketing to human capital management and product development.However, AI is still in its relative infancy.
For SMEs, this means establishing a powerful core that links departments, integrates business processes, connects data, and embeds intelligence to accelerate innovation and growth. And AI is the latest essential technology in the intelligent enterprise mix. However, a successful deployment of AI in an SME requires accurate, relevant and reliable data. The better the data, the better the AI-generated outcomes.
For example, deploying AI to make decisions based on unstructured third-party data – such as social media posts by potential customers – can lead to inaccurate or downright incorrect outcomes.
For SMEs, the journey to value-generating AI for business really starts with a digital transformation process that establishes a single source of truth for all business data. Here, enterprise resource planning systems are key: cloud ERP systems enable greater speed and predictability across all of an SME’s core business processes and can scale as the business grows or expands to new markets.