Given the nature of business, it isn’t at all surprising that in the digital age, tech is right at the forefront of everything; from production to sales techniques tech is informing the way we do business and is already coming to shape the future of commerce.
Increasingly, the role of people within traditional production is being reduced in favor of machines and robots that are far more capable of working with exacting precision over and over again. In fact, we could well reach a point where the vast majority of humans don’t have to work at all.
Ads, Ads, Ads!
Google and Facebook have a lot to answer for. Not only do they offer precision marketing, targeting specific groups of people who have already expressed an interest and are therefore more likely to convert, but they also allow you to refine your ads and increasingly automate them.
Google shopping ads, for example, allow your account to automatically bid for a spot so that all you need to do is set up the parameters for what you are inclined to spend and over what period. Similarly, Facebook allows you to set a budget that it will spend for you, concentrating the funding on your most successful ads and indicating how you might improve.
For businesses, this means that it is significantly cheaper and more efficient to target customers online than anywhere else and for customers, it means that your data is being used to bring you content considered most relevant to you. In other words, when it looks like a company is hounding you with ads, it’s actually just an algorithm that thinks it has you down. Combine this idea with the notion that we are living in a simulation game, and the way tech is going starts to get really creepy.
Automation in Everything
It isn’t just ads that run themselves, either. Automation within business is rapidly becoming mainstream and just keeping up with the trend isn’t quite enough if you want to stand out from the crowd.
Emails are one of the most common automated processes in business now and can be programmed to send once they reach a certain condition. For example, if you have an email list of contacts including details such as their birthday you could send a personalized birthday discount email automatically. Or you could track when people use your website and send them a ‘we miss you’ style email if they don’t visit within a certain time frame.
Where is Tech in Business Heading?
Well, judging by current trends, automation is a key component to the progression of business and the more processes that can be automated, the more profit the owner of the business will make. Add to this that AI and supercomputers are fast becoming a reality and the future looks quite different to today.
Given the exponential rate at which tech is exploding right now, it is fair to guess that soon technology will be doing quite a lot more of the work than we had bargained for.
