AI For All

Whether the economy is in a period of rapid growth or a major downturn, it’s often the topic of conversations and media attention alike. And while the stock market and big-name corporations often dominate headlines and news cycles around the state of the economy, many may be surprised to learn that it is small to medium-sized enterprises, also known as SMEs, that act as the true driving engine behind most economies globally. According to The World Bank, SMEs comprise a whopping 90% of businesses around the world and, on average, represent approximately half of employment.

SMEs carry the bulk of the U.S.’s gross domestic product (GDP) output and generate millions of jobs. A report by the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy notes that SMEs account for 44% of U.S. economic activity. Another report by the World Bank shows that SMEs are responsible for around 50% of worldwide employment as well as 40% of emerging markets.

These metrics show that SMEs are foundational components of the U.S. economy, and their growth is key for the health of the economy. The World Bank estimates 600 million jobs will be needed to absorb the growing workforce by 2030, opening new opportunities for SMEs to improve their operational efficiencies and deepen their integration into their respective value chains.

The good news: Technologies that could improve the efficiency, effectiveness and thus the profitability of SMEs already exist. At the top of this list of technologies is one many are already familiar with: artificial intelligence (AI).

The Role Of Artificial Intelligence In SME Growth

The human relationship to AI has been around for decades. With impressions ranging from the post-apocalyptic (think “The Matrix”) to the utopic (think automatic cancer diagnosis), the world has pondered the influence that machine intelligence could have on life and business.

Many of these ideas are no longer merely products of wishful imagination. As professor Melanie Mitchell of Portland State University puts it, “Today’s AI programs… can spot subtle financial fraud, find relevant web pages in response to ambiguous queries, map the best driving route to almost any destination, beat human grandmasters at chess and Go, and translate between hundreds of languages.”

This cognitive power has also been leveraged to produce results in financial settings. AI has been lauded for its ability to cut costs, automate tasks and create solutions. A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) illuminates the benefits of AI with great clarity and places a spotlight on its efficacy with SMEs. Per this report, “By identifying patterns in datasets and learning from tacit knowledge, new AI systems make automating nonroutine tasks possible and frees workers from repetitive lower value-added tasks,” the report states. “These new waves of automation could help SMEs increase productivity, e.g. by refocusing activities on higher value-added functions, by reducing human and economic costs associated with accidents or injuries, or improving work environment. The implementation of such systems could also help small businesses overcome administrative bottlenecks and increase reactivity at lower costs, for instance by enabling customer interaction 24/7.”

Automation is coming to simple apps that can be downloaded from on-line app stores to do critical tasks like reconciling bank accounts. The problem: Capital and information barriers have kept AI largely in the realms of corporate giants like IBM and conveniently out of reach of those that most need them: SMEs.

FatBrain: ‘Artificial Intelligence For All’ aims to change that

As a specialist in AI solutions for SMEs and beyond, FatBrain has cultivated AI solutions that enable every organization to simplify decision-making and harness data to grow, save and do better business. Daily, weekly, monthly SME problem cycles could involve the spectrum from “How can I get paid faster?”, “How should I pay my workers?”, “How can I get insured quickly?” to “When should I invest in capital?” FatBrain lowers the barriers to adopting data-driven AI solutions to address such questions.

FatBrain believes such problems facing SMEs today have been troubling business owners for decades. These problems have long been difficult to derive solutions for because they involve too much data, have too many variables, and require too much time to efficiently address.

FatBrain offers a comprehensive suite of solutions. It works by plugging into existing software-as-a-service (SaaS) products — like QuickBooks, Shopify, and Hubspot and aligns data there with millions of diverse market data signals. Then, the collected data is passed through FatBrain’s AI 2.0 Peer Intelligence engine which, alongside FatBrain expert coaches, turns masses of disparate data into peer-intelligence and actionable insights.

According to Chief Operating Officer Shawn Carey, FatBrain has worked with some of the biggest names in the business to help solve problems, including Bank of America Corp., Comcast Corp., IBM, Samsung Electronics and Pilgrim’s Pride. Now, it wants to level the playing field by bringing AI to the driving engine of the U.S. economy: SMEs.

FatBrain has a growing suite of plug-n-play solutions for SMEs that provide peer intelligence and actionable insights using FatBrain’s AI 2.0 technologies that are not available elsewhere in the market today. Stay tuned to learn more about how FatBrain and its solutions suite is revolutionizing AI for all.

By Jad Malaeb
Reposting of original Benzinga article