Economic Downturn 2022: How AI and NLP can Help Your Business Survive

We’ve heard the word “unprecedented” in abundance since the pandemic started, and it seems to be here to stay. With the continuing war in Ukraine, market volatility, a shutdown in China that’s sparking supply issues, and rocketing oil prices, investors are worried we’re on the cusp of an economic downturn in 2022. As are businesses, because the public markets and investor concerns raise questions around how to approach hiring, spending, funding rounds, and more. We’re here to dig into how AI, NLP, and data labeling come into play and can help your business. At the end of the day, an economic downturn can be an opportunity for those who adapt, evolve, and make sure their company survives. 

Economic Downturn 2022: Differing Perspectives

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1. Concern: We can’t predict what’s going to happen to the markets or the economy. In the face of so much flux and uncertainty, the safe move is to plan for the worst. Even the top VC funds slow down their deployment of capital at times like these, meaning less investments and less deals closed. Investor anxiety is up, inflation is up, and economic growth is down. There are concerns about market volatility, stagflation, or even recession. 
2. Optimism: There are many who believe that a recession is unlikely in 2022. Even with market volatility, some see hope in US economic strength. Investors are understandably selective, but there are opportunities out there and the economy is resilient. There’s hope in factors like the US potential for energy independence and the fact that Brent oil is still priced around its 25-year average. 

How AI and NLP Can Help 

AI is pivotal at times like these because it can improve every day, and it can improve your business every day as well. If you apply AI solutions to the right business opportunities, you can emerge and thrive out of an economic downturn. Whether or not you believe an AI winter is coming, AI evolves continually and remains something that can solve many of the problems we face today. So how can AI help business right now? 

Cut Costs

AI lets you cut costs without losing production. For example, using Datasaur for natural language processing (NLP) lets you automate the bulk of your text labeling for your ML model so you can get quality, labeled data quickly and accurately. On average, Datasaur saves our customers 2-4 engineers worth of time and resources. This drives down costs for developing AI/ML solutions and products, and helps your team focus on delivering a superior product. 

Automating Workflows

AI, ML, and DL can automate workflows and processes. For example, legal firms can use NLP labeling to build an AI that reviews contracts, finds information relevant to a case, and quickly trawls through legal research to label and connect legal documents. Similarly, healthcare providers can use AI for registration-related tasks, thus removing this task from staff members, which increases efficiency and dramatically reduces errors. Tools like Datasaur also offer advanced workforce management options that let you scale teams and projects, without sacrificing quality and output. You can automatically create and export projects, implement ML-assisted labeling, and pull team metrics without relying on self reporting. Automating workflows increases efficiency, pulls down costs, and reduces time on task for everyone—labelers, engineers, reviewers, and the like. 

Customer Support Automation and Lead Generation

By using NLP, companies can lessen the burden on—and reliance on—customer care teams. NLP and AI can automate a huge amount of customer experience tasks, freeing up team members to focus on individual care and more complex issues. NLP can help with ticket routing, call directing, understanding customer feedback, speech-to-text applications, and chatbots. This can bolster customer satisfaction in a big way. Bonus: chatbots can drive customer satisfaction, but chatbots and AI sales assistants can also increase website conversion rates and generate more qualified leads for the marketing/sales team.

These are undoubtedly uncertain times, and there’s a lot of talk around whether we’re on the cusp of an economic downturn in 2022. This is a time when your competitors may not plan well and could maintain high burn which hurts them in the long run. You can often pick up significant market share in an economic downturn by just staying alive and relying on the tools that are available to support your streamlining. You can bet that those that rise to the top of this time period will be using AI, and many companies that do not use AI will flounder and fall behind. 

To talk more about how NLP and Datasaur could help your business survive and thrive, feel free to reach out to info@datasaur.ai. We're here to help you build better AI with less time and resources.