3 unique AI/ML tools to cut your business expenses drastically & make it sustainable

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning is not just slowly changing our world but completely transforming it. As Sundar Pichai says, AI is more profound than electricity or fire.

If Data is the fuel for AI/ML, are you using this power to enhance your business operations? The future is uncertain. But spend and cash flow shouldn’t be. How can your business reduce its operating expenses and be more sustainable? Here are 3 tangible tools.

“In God we trust, all others bring data.” — W Edwards Deming

There are 100s of AI/ML startups mushroomed over the last few years. They provide solutions ranging from staff recruitment to data security. As statistics shows, one out of 10 enterprises uses more than 10 AI applications ranging from a chatbot, Fraud detector, security, and more.

Machine learning’s increased adoption across the industries has proved how its algorithms and techniques efficiently solve complex real-world problems. If AI helps you find cash and save money right away every day, why not start adapting to every business scenario possible.

When it comes to reducing the operating expenses and making the business sustainable, you need to follow Pareto 80/20 rule. It iterates that 80% of the savings can be achieved by implementing 20% changes in some areas.

My top areas for cost savings in a typical business are Energy consumption, Human resource cost, and procurement cost. I have selected one leading venture in each criterion that can significantly reduce your business operating expenses & make it more sustainable.

Energy Cost Reduction:

Energy consumption is the top expense for most businesses and industries, especially if you are still using fossil fuel-based electricity. Moving into renewable energy is the best path moving forward in terms of cost reduction and sustainability. In either case, conserving energy is crucial. Every unit of energy is cost spent for the business. Most enterprises get only one data point which is their energy bill, at the month-end. They believe that they understand their energy consumption pattern, and there is no potential for cost saves. They are either lucky or wrong! Smart business owners use data-driven strategies when it comes to cost reduction.

iEnergytics:

www.ienergytics.com

iEnergytics, an intelligent energy analytics platform offers a cost-effective yet efficient AI/ML energy analytics platform. It collects the data points like electricity, gas, water, temperature, pressure, vibration, unit production, etc., and co-relates beautifully to give businesses insights. These insights reveal how your energy is consumed in various departments/ machinery, correlating with other parameters like productivity data. Business leaders can look at this Data like how the accounting team looks at their dollar spent to save cost.

It also shows how much greenhouse gas is emitted during the process. By reducing the waste, businesses now can directly show the GHG emission saves and the cost reduction. It also allows you to simulate various possible scenarios to induce cost saves, such as reducing operating hours, changing shift timings, and bundling the production pipeline. Data Center managers & Green building owners can now efficiently use these insights for their future forecasting and planning. In addition to cost-saving, iEnergytics also allows the business to keep complete control of their premises through various alerts.

Human Resource Cost Reduction:

Human resources costs are the top ticket items in technology or IP-based businesses. AI/ML can save people cost in several ways to improve productivity and cut waste. Reducing your mundane, repetitive tasks are the low-hanging fruit.

BigML

BigML is a leading machine learning company that makes ML easy, beautiful, and understandable for everybody. It helps thousands of businesses worldwide make highly automated, data-driven decisions using (MLASS) machine learning as a service.

The company offers a wide variety of basic Machine Learning resources that can be composed together to solve complex Machine Learning tasks. Customers can access those resources using the BigML Dashboard, an intuitive web-based interface, or programmatically via its REST API. In addition to commercial activities, it is also playing an active role in promoting Machine Learning in education around the world through its education program.

Automatic optimization for model selection and parameterization of classification and regression algorithms saves a business a lot of time by creating and evaluating hundreds of models to find the best-performing ones. It also allows businesses to convert their workflows into reusable scripts in a single click.

Moving staff from mundane tasks reduces the cost to the business and increases productivity. It also improves employee morale and in turn sustainability in the long run.

Procurement Cost Reduction:

Procurement in any business presents a massive opportunity to save cost if they have the right insights to find the suitable vendor at a reasonable cost. Every organization has a tremendous amount of past procurement data, which is pretty much left as untouched dark data. Analyzing these data will give insights and strategies on vendors’ past performance, price points, competitor analysis, and negotiation opportunities.

Suplari

Suplari helps global finance and procurement teams continuously manage costs and cash flow using clean data, automated insights, and predictive actions. Their strategic sourcing increases your understanding of spending by category, supplier, and business unit to improve supplier negotiations. Identifies new preferred suppliers and reduces the supplier base with a data-driven approach to supplier rationalization and vendor consolidation.

It allows you to handle your compliances, supplier & contract management using AI/ML regression. It integrates the vendors from the market to compare pricing and other vital data points to make sensible decisions on your procurements.

To Conclude

Every dollar of cost avoidance is revenue for the business. In today’s context, post covid business landscape is highly competitive and hard to sustain. As a business owner or manager, you need to be on top of your cost-saving strategies to sustain and lead your business. The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

“Data are just summaries of thousands of stories — tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.”

Chip & Dan Heath

It would be best to concentrate on areas where you can benefit from cost-saving and sustainability: Energy consumption, Human resource cost, and procurement cost. iEnergytics, BigML & Suplari can assist in these respective areas.

Please do like or share this article if it helped you in any way. Please do share your business cost-saving strategies so your peers can get the benefit.