Artificial intelligence helps with all of these problems: Some tasks can be dealt with at a significantly lower cost when they’re automated, while automating business processes also frees up human employees’ time. This helps them focus on the most important and most value-creating tasks, which helps companies that have to deal with a lack of skilled labor.

After all, when their employees can use their time more efficiently due to having to do fewer time-consuming but easy-to-automate tasks, they can do more of the important work in their workday.

Expanding a business is also easier when some of the processes are automated, as this means fewer additional workers are needed as the company grows.

A great example of businesses that can be automated via AI is customer servicing, e.g. via chatbots that interact with customers. In some cases, these chatbots can solve the customer’s issue all by themselves, while they will escalate to the most qualified human for the respective issue in other cases.

Some of the companies that benefit from customer service automation with the help of AI include IBM (NASDAQ: IBM), which has developed Watson AI that is used for this task and many others by IBM’s customers.

Salesforce (NASDAQ: CRM) is another company offering automated customer servicing technology to its customers. As this technology grows, it seems quite likely that IBM, CRM, and other developers of such tools will generate higher and higher revenues from these products.

Other areas where business automation has a major impact include logistics, including warehousing and inventory planning, or work in HR departments. In logistics, companies such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT) and Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) are among the players utilizing AI, while Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has developed HR process automation tools that it sells to its customers.

Picking Winners

Companies that use AI for business automation should become more efficient over time, all else equal, and could thus benefit from higher margins down the road. Companies like WMT could thus become more profitable in the future.

Investors can also invest in the companies that allow other companies to automate their businesses, such as IBM with its Watson AI. Other AI companies benefit as well, of course, as the algorithms that are needed to automate business tasks need to be trained and maintained. Here, companies like NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) come into play – NVIDIA’s chips fuel the rise of AI in all areas, including in business automation.

Investors can also choose among our top Artificial Intelligence picks to benefit from increased Artificial Intelligence usage in business automation, as well as from general growth in the world of Artificial Intelligence.