Every day it can feel as though you’re hit with different suggestions as to the best route to take in your business. Should you investigate AI? Home working? Cloud security systems? A new, game-changing technology is always emerging or right around the corner, and that can make it difficult to keep up or relax into any sort of rhythm. After all, if everything is about to be upended, why not just wait until tomorrow to start for real?
Understanding how to take a more discerning attitude towards new business technologies might help you to navigate this field, coming out the other side with exactly what you need to take yourself further.
The Universal Tools
Social media is a good example of a business tool that is going to be useful to your brand regardless of what industry you find yourself in. Having a free way of marketing yourself through a platform that is used by many different types of audiences (with different platforms that contain further audiences) is just a natural digital foundation.
Similarly, most businesses out there will aspire to have a website at some point. It might not be something they do immediately, but it’s something that you want to have the proper impact when you do get around to it – something that you can achieve through other tools such as types of API that you can integrate into your website or app for a smoother user experience.
The Industry Specific Tools
That being said, there will also be tools that you might only be interested in because of how they pertain to your industry. Those in construction, for example, might be looking to invest in tools that can lead to a higher standard of work – even if that then means your staff members need to be trained to use those effectively.
These are going to be incredibly valuable to how you move forward, but it can be more difficult to find a template to follow here than it might be when it comes to examples like social media. Aligning your budget with your audience expectations, your competitors, and your targets for growth can help you identify which route to take.
Prospective Tools
That initial mention of AI might be something that has been on your mind. When something like that threatens to change the landscape of not just one industry but all of them, how are you meant to respond? Do you listen to the best-case scenarios and immediately get on board with what’s on offer, or do you take a different approach?
When a technology is so new and fresh, the possibilities for what it’s capable of are completely uncertain. While AI is proving itself to be valuable in a wide range of areas, it’s still very new. It’s not just the technology itself that you have to be conscious of in this situation; it’s the social consequences of how you approach it – such as how it could be seen as giving jobs to automated software instead of to human employees.