What’s the most precious resource for a small business? Arguably, there are three: capital, customers and time.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a technology that can act as a triple threat, addressing all three of these resources and making a small business look bigger in the process.
Andre Machicao, senior vice president at Visa Acceptance Solutions, and Josh Scheer, president and owner of White Lotus Travel Design, told Karen Webster that small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can use AI to create marketing plans and product descriptions in minutes without a big marketing team to do it. The tech can also help streamline back-end operations so that scheduling, reminding a customer of upcoming payment deadlines, and keeping on top of trends and news become automatic.
“We only have so much of it,” Scheer said of the minutes and hours in the day, adding, “there are many tasks that I can lean on AI for — and that’s where I’m really taking advantage of it.”
The human touch, augmented by AI, can help business owners gain a competitive advantage and customer loyalty, said Machicao and Scheer.
Machicao said Visa small business data shows that 1 in 5 U.S. SMB owners are very familiar with AI’s business capabilities.
By and large, small businesses are busy running their operations and are still trying to understand how to take advantage of AI and use it to improve their day-to-day operations, Machicao said. As Visa’s most recent small business survey shows, around 7 in 10 Americans who have implemented AI into their small business did so to increase productivity.
White Lotus Travel Design crafts customized itineraries for clients based on their unique tastes and requirements. Travel is seeing a snapback, and Scheer said requests are to the Mediterranean and parts of Europe.
Scheer offered a unique insight into the advantages of using AI and its limitations. He recounted that not long ago, a client tasked Scheer with a challenge. The client used Google and ChatGPT to create their own itinerary, and then asked Scheer to “beat” that itinerary in a specific region of France.
“This was my very first customer call,” said Scheer.
AI was indeed good at generating information specific to the chateaus, towns and local hot spots, all of which was raw material as Scheer did his own first cut at the itinerary, he said.
But what the models missed was the human touch, the small considerations and empathy that, taken together, add up to a truly memorable trip when considering personalities and personalization, he said. Maybe someone only wants a single activity a day; maybe another person in the group doesn’t drink.
“You might not know how to ask these questions unless you have experience,” Scheer said. “My job is to take what the client expected to see, and what ChatGPT generates — and then customize it based on [my experience and knowledge.]”
Scheer said he “beat” the AI model, and the client has returned to White Lotus three times for subsequent trips.
The model of man working with machine has been integral in helping White Lotus Travel Design grow its client base. Scheer advocated a “slow and steady” approach and added that his initial forays in using AI to improve workflows began with an online scheduling tool to reach out and liaise with clients and would-be customers, as well as create email and marketing lists.
Now, he said, his clients have an app in hand that they can use while traveling to store vouchers and other features — all done at scale. White Lotus also manages two separate payments flows, including a professional services fee that covers initial research. Another payment comes through invoicing clients the outline of the travel itself — and who’s getting paid, how much and when. (Scheer uses a PCI-compliant platform to manage those functions.)
Echoing the importance of freeing up time so that the human element can shine, Machicao said Visa has been working on “prompt engineering,” which uses that aforementioned expertise to improve models. AI is a key tool Visa uses in the battle against fraudsters and in building risk management models that ensure that customers are who they say they are.
“We’re benefiting from the 269 billion transactions that we see annually that help inform these models and drive that insight,” Machicao said.
Visa has its own human touch in the form of payments and commerce experts, along with insight into governance and best practices in the fast-moving regulatory sphere, Machicao said. Card enumeration attacks have been on the rise, where criminals try massive “trial and error” attacks to see if they can get card-not-present transactions authorized in the event that some combination of credentials works.
“We can isolate, identify fraudsters and protect the merchant from those bad actors so they don’t have to worry about the fraud risk or the chargeback risk,” he said.
Visa helps ensure that transactions are authorized and legitimate even if a customer comes back later and says it wasn’t for any reason, Scheer said.
With those fraud-fighting and marketing tasks no longer as manual as they once were, said Scheer, “the human touch becomes where you want to allocate your time.”
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