How to use automation to combat inflation

The goal of every company is growth and expansion. But when inflation strikes, how can a business flourish? Typically, organizations resort to price hikes to defend themselves, which is not always optimal for attracting and retaining customers. Alternatively, companies should combat inflation with AI-powered automation.

While some big-name brands, like Target, struggled to meet quarterly sales expectations, Salesforce experienced a surge. (CNBC, 2023) By devoting $20 billion to AI research and development over the past seven years, the company’s fiscal second quarter rose 78% from 2022. (The Street, 2023)

With AI, companies can leverage automation to drive new revenue streams, increase productivity, and maximize the efficiency of existing personnel. Plus, AI models continue to become faster thanks to cheaper and increasingly powerful computing capabilities. (Morgan Stanley, 2022)

Automate monotonous sales and marketing tasks

Marketing and sales are two areas in which businesses should integrate automation to combat inflation. In particular, automation will eliminate friction and inefficiencies while accelerating time-consuming processes and producing higher ROI.

For sales and marketing, AI can help automate repetitive tasks such as lead qualification and generation, deal closing, social media advertising, email marketing, product promotions, etc. (Forbes, 2023). Automating these monotonous processes will not only save time and money but also increase efficiency.  

It’s worth noting that most of these automations will be customer-related interactions. As such, the customer must be the one who initiates everything, whether by responding to feedback on a survey or enrolling in a loyalty program.  

Empower knowledge workers to do more with less 

Restricted by slim resources and leaner budgets, hiring more personnel is off the table – however, automation and AI-powered customer service bots never get sick or need a coffee break. Plus, once processes become automated, companies free up in-house talent to work on higher-level growth-oriented and revenue-generating tasks that require more problem-solving and interpretation.

To use sales and marketing as an example, removing repetitive tasks, like responding to emails and crunching numbers, opens up their schedule to focus on crafting new marketing strategies and fostering closer relationships with high-value accounts.

From an HR and administration perspective, AI-enabled automation can empower knowledge workers to divert their efforts to more pressing growth objectives. For example, completing contracts and reading resumes can be automated by an AI or machine learning engine. (Forbes, 2022)  

Personalize interactions and see the future with the power of AI

Amid inflation, AI can enable organizations to connect with customers through personalized campaigns and targeted promotions effectively. AI analytical tools can glean insights from big data significantly faster than manual efforts, providing marketing, sales, etc., departments with the information they need to deliver individualized content to customers, boosting completion and conversation rates.

At the same time, generative AI, in particular, has the incredible ability to “learn” over time. The more data it gets exposed to, the faster it becomes at forecasting market trends and making relevant suggestions or preventive course-of-action. Such predictive capability will be invaluable during inflation.

Overcome inflation with Smart Automation  

While things might look bleak with current figures, the economy always bounces back, and those brands that have already integrated automation into their business processes will continue to succeed. Contact us today to see how our Smart Automation communications automation platform can help your company survive and thrive amid today’s inflation.