If you want your business to succeed, you should embrace digital technology. Aside from providing you the tools to better run a company, it will also save you valuable financial resources. Here are the reasons why.

A vending machine in Japan can predict your favorite drink based on facial expressions and body language. Artificial intelligence in human resources management enables companies to filter candidates for new positions. A sales manager in South America can work together with a marketing director in Northern Asia seamlessly.

These are but a few examples of digital technology in business. Three others include automation, analytics, and machine learning and optimization.

Tools for Automated Processes

The essence of doing business is making money. Even non-profit organizations and government agencies need to somehow make an income to survive. As obvious as this might sound, many companies often don’t focus on collection processes and data management actualization.

By collection processes, we are referring to the steps starting when the customer is sold a product or provided a service up until the cost of this product or service is in the provider’s hands. As for data management actualization, it is the keeping of an updated database on seller-buyer transactions.

Let us look at a simple example of both. When you go to the supermarket, you first select the products that you like. Having done that, you proceed to the cashier and pay them. In this case, the collection process is straightforward. You pay either by cash or credit card, and the supermarket gets the money. The transaction is then recorded, and you get a receipt.

But what if, instead of a product, you are providing a service? What if this service is non-quantifiable, for instance, a medical appointment or an ongoing treatment? Would you charge based on the time or the action performed? If the client has health insurance, how would you deal with the primary payment, and what is covered by the provider? In case of a treatment, how would you handle installments?

As you can see, it gets complicated very fast. Enter revenue cycle management systems, a fully-integrated solution to identify, collect, and manage revenue based on your services. It is a great tool for doctors as they don’t have to look into the intricacies of getting paid but rather focus on their expertise, which is to provide medical care.

Analytics in Decision Making

If you have a website, chances are you have heard about Google Analytics. For those who don’t, it is a platform that allows site owners to measure a wide variety of variables such as visitor rates, countries of origin, bounce percentages, and growth or depreciation in traffic levels. There are also others.

Whether you are online or not, one of the key factors in business success is knowing who your customers are. Aside from this, it is crucial to understand what drives their purchasing patterns, how your company measures up against the competition, and what edge your organization might own.

In the digital age in which we live, any self-respecting business will have a strong online presence. As a result, using analytics is vital to many decisions within the enterprise.

For example, analytics tools can help you focus on a specific market if you know it is your biggest revenue source. They can also assist you in implementing targeted online marketing campaigns based on season or time of popularity.

If you are in the clothing business and you see that your post on trendy jackets is trending in the right direction, you can focus your entire campaign on this and similar products. If, on the other hand, it isn’t, you can cut your losses before they become worse and move elsewhere.

Machine Learning and Optimization

In the Terminator movie series, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cybernetic organism sent through time to protect the leader of the human resistance in the battle against the machines. It seems a bit ironic that a machine would help a human being against other machines.

In any case, the longer this “robot” interacts with people, the more human it becomes. In the end, it can even understand highly complex notions like longing, joy, and why people cry.

Twenty years into the 21st century, this is still not possible. Yet, we are starting to see some of its applications in business. If you have a complaint against your bank, website manager, or internet service provider, you can now engage in a live chat with a customer service representative.

As I am sure most of us know, this “representative” is more often than not a machine, a self-learning bot that uses your information to generate a quasi-suitable response.

It is not a perfect response because the customer knows that he is not talking to a human being. Even so, if the issue is solved, does it really matter? From a business perspective, wouldn’t you use this simple AI mechanism for most customer complaints too? It can save your enterprise time and money.

Digital technology is both the present and the future of business. We have seen three trends currently spearheading this movement. Whether dependency on software and hardware is ultimately beneficial to people, only time will tell.