During the pandemic especially, it's become overwhelming for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to answer all of their customer service requests. A Freshworks survey found that companies experienced a 71% increase in overall contact volume between February 2020 and January 2021, and expect it to increase further. At the same time, customers -- while empathetic -- have become more demanding. The same poll shows that 68% of customer service managers have seen an increase in customer expectations. What's a company to do? Automation is one route to more manageable customer experience workloads, potentially.

Still, it is very important to take a close look at the impact it is having on a particular task--and it is perhaps even more important to ask critical questions, as the use of AI unfolds in different vertical markets. Take for instance one very specific area today: recruitment and hiring. Roughly 95% of HR (human resources) professionals believe AI could help with the application process for candidates, according to a recent study from Tidio. With companies receiving roughly 250 resumes for each corporate job opening, AI offers the opportunity to help match the perfect candidate to the perfect job, helping minimize some of the challenges currently faced by the worker shortage. Artificial intelligence can help with screening candidates, searching for candidates on different platforms, creating job descriptions, and conducting initial interviews among other things.

These days, education is more important to businesses than ever. Not only do companies need to keep employees properly trained and certified, but employers also have to be mindful of how their remote employees are educating their children: Parents who are dissatisfied with how their kids are learning or who are even resorting to homeschooling will probably demonstrate the impact of those burdens in terms of productivity. One option that could make both of those scenarios easier is using artificial intelligence (AI) for teaching--and it's not as far-fetched as you might think. A recent study by Tidio, an AI chatbot developer for apps such as help desks, shows that 53% of its US respondents said they'd be fine with an AI teaching their kids. The study collected answers from 1,027 respondents using Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Reddit.