OPINION: Five core business areas AI can drive revenue

According to the United Nations, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, of which $1.2 trillion could be generated by Africa.

With the potential to unlock significant growth and development in key industries across the continent, AI is fundamentally changing how businesses operate, driving innovation, improving efficiency and transforming lives.

Businesses of all sizes that have already invested in AI are reaping its benefits, from increasing business productivity and agility to improving customer experience and decision-making, with McKinsey noting that AI leaders are outperforming their industry peers by a factor of 3.4.

For businesses to fully capitalise on the opportunities presented by AI, it’s crucial to implement it in areas where it can make the most significant impact. Below are some key areas and examples of how businesses can leverage AI to drive revenue growth.

One of the most obvious places AI can help drive revenue in a business is in finances and billing.

In 2023, Kenya's AI sector secured 1.96 billion in funding, according to a report by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association.

The report emphasised how Kenyans are leveraging AI to optimise business operations and enhance everyday activities.

When it comes to expense bills, for example, an AI tool with built-in image recognition would allow a business to scan its bills with the system, and then auto-generate the amount, place, date, time, and category of expense, helping save loads of time and effort.

For billing, meanwhile, AI can greatly accelerate the onboarding process for new clients by automating large parts of it.

AI-powered tools can also extract relevant information from invoices, including customer details and product descriptions, and automatically populate billing systems for increased efficiency.

Another key area is new business leads. AI can help assess the calibre of leads that the sales team is bringing in.

After all, two or three great leads can be more beneficial than ten weak ones. Using a points-based system, AI can help score leads according to their quality. This allows the sales team to better evaluate which leads are worth pursuing.

In turn, that should allow them to make more sales at a more meaningful level.

Customer experience (CX), rather than product or price differences, has been the major differentiator for businesses for some time now. Customers are willing to spend more, are more likely to stay loyal and recommend a business to friends and family if they have a good experience with it.

For instance, the introduction of chatbots by Kenyan banks has streamlined digital banking, improved customer onboarding, and facilitated increased transactions on internet and mobile banking platforms.

Businesses, therefore, need to pull out more stops than ever to ensure that their customer experience stands out.

Here again, AI can be helpful. Take sentiment analysis, for example. AI can help identify disgruntled customers by their interactions across touchpoints, allowing customer success teams to focus on their needs and turn their experience of the business around.

The most effective marketing today is highly personalised and targeted. AI can make it significantly easier to achieve the level of targeted personalisation necessary for marketing success today.

Once integrated with a company’s data, an AI marketing tool can create and hone personalised marketing content based on individual customers' CRM data.

There is a strong correlation between employee productivity and revenue. Employee productivity is in turn driven by positive employee experiences.

The more productive your employees are, the higher your revenues and profit margins will be.

AI can help improve both productivity and the overall employee experience by automating repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on the kind of meaningful work that drives increased revenues. 

Embrace AI, but use the right providers; while AI can add immense value when it comes to driving revenue within organisations, it's also critical that businesses know what they’re getting into when embracing AI.

That means doing comprehensive background research and ensuring that they choose tools that meet their needs and adhere to privacy best practices.

The writer is the East Africa Regional Manager at Zoho Corp.