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The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on SaaS Businesses

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The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on SaaS Businesses

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Artificial Intelligence is widely dominating the current tech and cyberspace. Some even speculate that it will both disrupt and improve the SaaS industry. This article will look at how artificial intelligence really impacts the current SaaS industry and how it is today.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dominated technology and cyberspace now more than in the last decade. It further aids many processes in a vast area of human activities. These activities encompass processes in the health sector, security, social interactions, entertainment, and various business processes.

AI improves different businesses and their processes by providing various features and functions that not only substitute but sometimes surpass human capabilities. It carries out simple yet tedious analytical procedures thus giving more time for humans to perform high-level tasks.

What AI offers is enhanced functionality, efficiency, security, and costs. This extends to improving user experience, brand loyalty rate, and cutting costs while improving higher revenue, which is detrimental for businesses, especially in the Software-as-a-Service sector. No wonder why many SaaS businesses nowadays are built and developed with AI capabilities.

How AI changed the SaaS Industry overtime

Software-as-a-Service has revolutionized the software market since its entry in the early 2000s. It has cut so many costs, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies that traditional software has been carrying. SaaS has dramatically reduced, if not totally, the cost of implementation in many companies. Being completely accessible over the cloud and having no need for installation, SaaS successfully reduced the cost of implementation in terms of money and time. There has been minimal, if not none at all, need for businesses to use SaaS to acquire and maintain data storage and warehouses. SaaS has also cut across compatibility problems which offline software may have shortcomings and additional costs.

But as much as these breakthroughs were brought forth by SaaS, AI, even more, complements the former’s functionality. Companies have used Machine Learning, a type of Artificial Intelligence, since the mid-2010s in their customer relationship management. Einstein for example is a Salesforce Artificial Intelligence program that started in early 2013 and was launched in 2016 to help identify customers’ demands based on their past actions through machine learning, thus creating better customer relationships. Integration of Einstein provided meaningful customer data insights, which have proactively helped businesses mitigate customer service problems. Furthermore, Salesforce integrated Einstein’s unstructured data with IBM’s Watson to analyze and help target seasonal customers by examining their purchase patterns and external factors such as the weather and social events that may relate to their purchase patterns. Today, with much improvement and added features such as the internal department’s efficiency analyses and key performance indicators monitoring, Einstein is replaced, as we now call Tableau CRM.

Today, Artificial Intelligence’s usage on SaaS surpassed just data analyses. With its natural language processing and deep learning, artificial intelligence assists SaaS businesses and their clients in aspects that seem to need human intelligence. Such as grammar and diction assistance in literature and image analyses that may automatically edit images for faster processing.

With this widespread usage of artificial intelligence, which experts predict to have an estimated market value of $733 billion by 2027, Artificial Intelligence will invade the SaaS market and bring disruptions and benefits. The following are the benefits of integrating Artificial Intelligence into SaaS.

The Impact of AI on SaaS Businesses

1. Using AI technology offers faster solutions

Artificial Intelligence can hasten up processes in SaaS businesses in their different areas. In the sales area, where lead generation and validation take more time than converting , artificial intelligence will ease up filtering down the most promising ones, giving more time for businesses to stimulate more revenues. This is done through AI’s machine learning and natural language processing. AI shortlists the leads with the highest probability of being closed through their search and purchase history and other external patterns such as weather or occasions.

2. Improved Data Security

One major security risk users face when availing of cloud-based services such as SaaS is a data security risk. However insignificant, leak or stolen data from SaaS destroys a reputation that may have been built for years. Artificial Intelligence can help secure such data with different methods, such as authorizations and malicious activity detections.

SaaS businesses can integrate Artificial Intelligence with implementing authorizations to ensure only certain persons can access certain data, which is critical for the company. Integrations could include biometric authorization, among others, which may be in conjunction with having passwords.

With its modern capabilities, AI can also help in learning how cybercriminals work, which may help detect and block attempts of cyber attacks. Such detection and blocking may be crucial for SaaS businesses, as their competitive edge, on-cloud service, are prone to denial of service attacks or several downtimes. Although machine learning today requires tons of data to be learned for it to be helpful, this feature of AI in cybersecurity poses a promising potential for SaaS.

3. Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis may be one of the best impacts of AI on SaaS business; when we can predict data more accurately, we can produce more productive outcomes. It undoubtedly helps SaaS businesses provide more value to their users in different ways, such as lead generation in marketing, lead validations in sales, cyberattack detection in data security, and quality customer assistance in CRM.

With its advantage, AI’s predictive analysis has a step-back. For it to work effectively, there must be tons of input for machine learning to predict data accurately. Although this is not without a cost, improvements of ML on requiring data will be more imminent as more user interaction inputs are needed.

4. Better Customer Service and Experience

Artificial intelligence has also proved to assist in managing customer relationships in various ways. With the help of AI, SaaS businesses can do hyper-personalization, giving their clients a more flexible usage of the software they are availing of based on their more specific interests and needs. With many options in the user interface, clients might be overwhelmed in browsing what fits their preferences. Also, with AI’s predictive analysis, businesses may recommend clients so they can choose and finish projects quicker.

Furthermore, AI-powered virtual assistants (chatbots may serve as an example), which can be available 24/7, can be employed to assist pre-determined and frequent issues of clients. Such is very beneficial both for SaaS businesses and its clients. AI-powered virtual assistants are helpful for SaaS businesses as the cost of hiring virtual assistants can be high, especially when SaaS operates internationally, which means more labor to cater to different time zones. Clients will benefit from AI-powered virtual assistants as they are available whenever needed. AI’s natural language processing can address clients’ issues more quickly, making the use of SaaS more efficient. AI-powered virtual assistance does not remove human virtual assistants’ jobs; it only minimizes the time and cost of assisting SaaS clients on simple yet repetitive issues that most of them encounter.

5. Improved Marketing, Thus, Bringing More Revenue

Marketing strategies comprise not only making creative advertisements. It also involves technical activities such as responding to emails, conducting surveys, or doing follow-ups when SaaS clients are idle. Artificial Intelligence can help in these areas of marketing.
AI can customize marketing-oriented emails before being scheduled to be sent to potential leads. Its customization may create more probable leads and reduce the marketing team’s workload, spending it on more value-adding activities. Artificial intelligence may also generate surveys, which filter only the questions that matter in providing clients with their needs and stimulating more sales. Following up with clients who have stopped or have gone idle in using the SaaS through pre-tailored emails may increase the chances of them staying and using the software, thus not only bringing but retaining business revenue.

Example of SaaS that Uses AI Technology

1. Removal.AI: Removes the Background Automatically from Images

artificial intelligence saas

Removal.AI is a SaaS background remover tool powered by advanced computer vision algorithms. It detects the foreground pixels and separates the background from the foreground. This type of machine learning may require assistance from data scientists and graphic artists for it to learn how to remove picture backgrounds more accurately, which the site has been successfully achieving.

With Removal.AI’s integration of AI as background remover, human editors can offer more value-adding services for clients, like applying shadow or color grading photos. Such AI’s help has been an excellent opportunity for Removal.AI as their free background remover entices their clients to avail more of their services.

2. Jasper.AI: Writing Assistant

Impact of artificial intelligence on business

Jasper.AI, formerly Jarvis.AI, is a writing assistant designed to guide writers in making creative content. It is interesting in this SaaS that not only does it check grammar or improve writers’ writing style, Jasper, an artificial intelligence robot, can write content by itself. Thus, it helps the writers give them a jumpstart to avoid writer’s block. Clients may also set Jasper’s writing genre by inputting the “tone of voice” to the SaaS. “Tone of voice” is a keyword or phrase to which Jasper will follow its writing pattern. It s a massive breakthrough for clients as they may hasten up their writing process while not sacrificing the content quality.

3. Morphl.io: AI Tool for ECommerce Personalization

Impact of artificial intelligence on saas

Morphl.io, founded in 2018, is a SaaS company specializing in developing digital products and services by democratizing AI. It helps mainly mid-sized e-commerce companies adopt artificial intelligence into their platforms to better connect their customers to their respective content that matches their customers’ preferences. They integrate their search engine, search bar, and its vast features to make the clients’ platform more user-friendly to their customers. In 2021, Morphl.io was acquired and merged with Algolia, a similar SaaS company.

4. Surferseo: Content Optimization Platform

artificial intelligence and saas

Surferseo is a platform that provides specific tools powered by artificial intelligence for content optimization. These include the SERP analyzer, which offers data analyses on different traits of its clients’ content, such as average word, character count, and keyword frequency. It also scans for LSI keywords and recommends such to be included in writing to make the clients’ content more reachable to readers.

5. Lumen 5: Easily Create Videos

artificial intelligence and saas business

Lumen 5 is a video creating and editing SaaS which helps businesses create appealing videos that showcase their brand to the market. It is filled with many pictures and pre-made videos for clients. These cover various genres that may fit businesses’ preferences regarding how they will present their brand. An artificial intelligence feature of Lumen 5 is suitable for newbie video editors, as it assists them in making storyboards and creating good video advertisements within minutes.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence, when integrated with SaaS, produces a more effective service that is efficient both for its clients and the businesses themselves. As we continue with the continuous progress of artificial intelligence, we can say that the future is bright for the SaaS industry as these two currently prove synergistic towards one another.

Yen is a content writer and the full-time lead SEO at Removal.AI - an AI-powered background remover tool used to automatically remove background from images. She is also a technology enthusiast who loves to write informative content about the latest tech, digital trends, SEO, and startup business actionable tips.

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