Why You Should Let Artificial Intelligence Creep Into Your Business

Signpost is a service that lets brick-and-mortar store owners publish incentives and promotions on its website. Last summer, the New York City-based company's founder and CEO, Stuart Wall, created a new app: the A.I.-centric Mia. Through its natural language generation capability, Mia crafts messages and sends them to prospects at opportune times. It tracks and analyzes a store's calls, emails, and credit card swipes, and then makes what it decides is the right pitch. "New customers often tell me they show up because of our five-star reviews, which I hear about through Mia," says Randy Jewart, owner of Resolution Gardens, a landscaping company in Austin, and a Mia subscriber.