Artificial Intelligence in B2B Commerce

“What’s the big deal?” A.I. could make you the biggest deal in the biz!

With Artificial Intelligence – A.I. – bursting onto the global stage in the 2010s, it sometimes feels like an overwhelming topic on which to keep informed. Staying on top of the abilities of A.I. is one thing, but it’s another to feel you can apply it effectively to your own world – whether for pleasure or business – with confidence. Don’t worry! It’s not as complicated as it seems – in fact, it’s here to hold your hand and do the legwork for you – a super-smart assistant! So, let me detail exactly how you can incorporate A.I. into your B2B commerce and make it work for you.

 

What is A.I.?

Artificial Intelligence, as it exists today, sits in the valley between autonomy and algorithms. It is able to take existing information – any data you deem to feed it, whether that be qualitative or quantitative – and intelligently streamline that data in order to form conclusions. This means your analytics can be managed on an immense scale, and dynamically applied to incredibly specific situations.

It does this via a series of pre-processes and processes, which convert the data into a format that the computer can understand. It categorises the raw data – structured or non-structured (numbers, or opinions, it’s all workable for the A.I.!) – through systems of machine learning, natural language comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving. On the other side, you are left with information. This could be formatted as images, robotics, code, copy, graphs, and analytics.

What are the implications of A.I. being used in B2B?

With exponential advancements in the technology behind information and communication, A.I. is able to conceptualise vast quantities of data – just like an ERP – but A.I. does more than organise your data. It turns it into useful, comprehensive knowledge. In B2B, A.I. can be brought into the fray to process information quickly, and because this technology is more accurate than ever before in the history of computer thinking, it can stay up to date second to second.

As a society, we now feel that the information we are given by A.I. is accurate, relevant, tailor-made to our requirements – that it understands exactly what we are asking of it. Hence, we can confidently apply its solutions to real-world situations. We can use any combination of its processes to help B2B marketers, managers, and reps alike to acquire vital knowledge, and pursue the best possible solutions for their business.

These solutions are applicable in four distinct areas:

1.    Customer Knowledge:

Your customers are those with whom you do business, and it’s essential to understand their needs and wants, as well as any expectations they might have when conducting their business with you. A.I. can take on every facet of their individual data, and their interactions with you – firm size, frequency and recency of past deals, types of purchases, web-browsing activities, demographic and even psychographic conduct when interacting with your business – and create customer profiles 1.

It can then analyse these profiles to identify what it is your customers prefer about your company compared to the competition, streamline customer interactions and hence enhance the customer experience, and suggest ways to improve customer relations 2. It’s also the perfect way to modernise your First Point of Contact customer service, via use of chatbots, to solve simple problems and connect the customer to the ideal person to help them out.

Additionally, it can search for untapped potential customers, rate leads from highest to lowest quality, and even plan the best way for your company to approach these leads.

2.    User Knowledge:

It’s also important to be able to spot where your customer’s user data can come in handy. After all, they may be a few rungs away on the supply chain, but they are the ones stoking your fire. It is via provision of user opinions and experiences that you can better envision future requirements and desires of the global user. Not only can you get a good idea of the desires of the general consumer, but you can narrow it down as precisely as you’d like: age, gender, locale, education, political leanings, personal values, wealth, working environments - even their eye colour! – to discover potential untapped user desires, wants, and niches you could fulfil.

By utilising this invaluable and specific data via Artificial Intelligence, you can accurately pinpoint the reasoning behind market changes, frequency of purchases, and predict the future habits of the users of your products. This means the ability to adapt quickly to a fickle populace that can alter on the whim of a TikTok trend. Users are the people who feed your business, and their opinions are invaluable to progress and growth.

3.    Market Knowledge:

A.I. also enables us to understand the external ebb and flow of the world-wide market with a level of accuracy that would be impossible without its sequencing processes. It can be tailored to deliver a holistic understanding of just how parallel markets and external deals may be – unbeknownst to you – currently affecting your own transactions and business relationships. And, more importantly, it can perform incredibly well-informed extrapolation reports, from potential future boons and threats alike, to your dealings with individual customers.

It learns this by analysing internal and external data, and each stakeholder’s position – be it competitors, legislators, international affairs, and news organisations. It processes this information collectively to provide you with the most accurate, pertinent, tailored solutions, perhaps even to hurdles you hadn’t realised you could even trip up on.

4.    Competitor Knowledge:

A.I. is also able to identify emerging competitors and lateral developments, and give you the opportunity to outmanoeuvre them and get a head start on potential emerging markets and customer leads. By analysing the movements of your competition, A.I. can provide you with detailed reports of exactly how they are outperforming your own strategies, and then recommend potential ways to get ahead. Without having to actually hack into their systems Spy-Kids style – (which is illegal, don’t do that!) – A.I. will provide you with all the intel you could need to find exactly how you fare in the marketplace alongside the competition.

What’s the Catch?

It's perhaps worth mentioning that the A.I. we use today is not yet the ‘true’ artificial intelligence of science fiction movies (where Haley-Joel Osment learns to experience the emotion of love) and cannot invent its own ideas or form conclusions in a void. A.I. only knows what it is programmed to know. It will be ignorant of forces to whit it has no knowledge – because it has not been fed this information. It is also subject to all it has known before, and “unlearning” is not easy to do for most A.I. programming – once it’s in there, it is not readily or accidentally forgotten.

However, that might remain to be seen as a good thing – particularly in B2B sales – as it means that the software is working solely on hard facts when it comes to the hard data of the present, and not throwing wild cards around in the morning conference room to confuse everybody.

Humans and A.I. Working Together

That’s not to say humans are obsolete – far from it! Humans use creativity, intuition, experience, and instincts a lot of the time – and while following serendipitous leads and taking risks absolutely pays off in the world of business, it doesn’t work the same way when a computer is generating speculative ideas. Human brains are also computers, and hence intuition is not left to chance – but is actually our own way of processing data we have picked up, and forming a solution we subconsciously predict is likely to result in a positive outcome.

If you asked a typical computer to randomly choose a number from a die 100 times over, it would eventually result in a pretty equal tally of numbers 1 through 6. If you asked a human to choose 100 random numbers between 1 and 6, however, the variety of answers of a period of time would sway in favour of a particular number, and be notably biased 3. Because of this, humans are far from obsolete in the entrepreneurial world, as their dynamism is an absolutely necessity in the formula for success. Our inimitable abilities to read other people from a mere glance – cognitive empathy – and creative inputs are vital for sustained innovation in any industry. The human touch is irreplaceable. A.I. is merely a tool to use in tandem with your people, giving you and your colleagues more time to explore conceptual futures, make decisions, and pursue the more creative facets of the brand identity – including building personable rapport with, and providing tailored support to, your customers.

One Giant Leap for Mankind, One Small Step on the Ladder

As it stands, A.I. can only provide solutions from the data that it is deliberately fed, and externally available data which it has learned is relevant, to provide you with concise qualitative information. This is beneficial for B2B commerce as it means that any information you receive is tailored solely to your business, and hence far more likely to enable you to successfully implement changes and identify prospective customers.

The global landscape is complex, rapid, and overwhelming; and with so much content and information to comprehend, the use of A.I. is practically a necessity when considering the future of trade, particularly in the high-stakes realm of B2B commerce. However, it should be made clear to all who choose to utilise this tool should see it only as such: a tool. It is not ideal to replace human eyes with computer thinking, and it can be difficult for managers to implement A.I. if they do not understand the technology behind it. But its future is inevitable, and it's far better to begin to incorporate it now than to be left behind in its wake.

1.      Abrell, T., Pihlajamaa, M., Kanto, L., vom Brocke, J., & Uebernickel, F. (2016). The role of users and customers in digital innovation: insights from B2B manufacturing firms. Information & Management, 53, 324-335.

2.      Syam, N., & Sharma, A. (2018). Waiting for a Sales Renaissance in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Machine Practice. Industrial Marketing Management, 69, 135-146.

3.      Warren, P. A., Gostoli, U., Farmer, G. D., El-Deredy, W., & Hahn, U. (2018, May). A Re-Examination of “Bias” in Human Randomness Perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(5), 663-680.