MSMEs in the Age of AI

The AI era has arrived. While AI had been around for decades, the Covid-19 crisis stoked the fires of its cross-sector applications, as social distancing measures forced countries, businesses, and individuals to go fully digital. As we move into the fourth industrial revolution, the need to build capacity to learn faster and upskill in real time should be the driving force behind all employee training activities.

However, the notion that advanced technologies like AI and ML are unaffordable and thus only serve the needs of large enterprises with deep pockets has become obsolete. The MSME’s must come out of this notion in order to be in line with the new industry changes.

Few ways AI introduction can assist MSME’s

1. Provides a better Access to Finance

a. Improving access to unsecured loans to small businesses

b. Matching MSMEs with the right financial institution.

2. Enabling Product Enhancement and Customer Engagement

a. Using data from chatbot platforms

b. Analyzing customer feedback

3. Smarter Marketing

a. Predicting customer behavior to forecasting sales

b. Achieving leads

Hence few opportunities that can be approached by SMEs in order to stay put is by,

1. Leveraging on existing platforms: Several tech companies have open-sourced their AI efforts in an effort to bring AI to a wider audience. Using this platform for your business saves you a lot of money and time when it comes to developing and designing. Few examples are Caffe, Spark MLlib etc.

2. Outsourcing it to a consulting company: The primary motivation for companies to outsource, and the most visible benefit, is to save money. It is both necessary and feasible. Managed services can help you cut the costs of hiring new employees quickly, and an outsourced team can help your company stay financially flexible without having to hire full-time employees if demand is uncertain.

3. Hiring a Freelancer: They frequently bring skill sets and experience of those, full-time employees lack. Employers can hire workers with specialized skills from other parts of the world.