Much discussion about AI centres around a frightening future and how the technology poses an existential threat to jobs, accepted business models – even humanity itself! But in the near term, it can provide lots of straightforward and easy-to-understand business benefits for companies of all sizes.

Many are already embracing the possibilities of AI and reaping the benefits. Here, we take a look at a few examples, from a convenience store using it to cut shoplifting to the travel company hoping to reduce bureaucracy.

Fighting fraud: Pets at Home

Pets at Home is a listed petcare company that opened its first store in Preston in 1991. It now has more than 450 retail pet stores and 700 grooming centres and veterinary practices in the UK.

The retail part of the business involves e-commerce and has suffered from fraud. The company has turned to AI to fix the problem.

William Hewish, chief innovation officer at the company, set up an AI transformation team to see how the technology could be used using Microsoft Copilot Studio.

He decided the company’s small fraud prevention team would be a good place to start because any impact would be “easily measurable”.

It took the team just a week to build a semi-autonomous AI agent that could find potential cases of fraud and prepare a report for a human specialist. The agent interrogated transaction data at a scale and speed humans could not match.

It spotted things like repeatedly used images of supposedly damaged pet food used during fraudulent returns that had been shared among fraudsters. The AI agent “blew our socks off”, says Hewish, and the company thinks a seven-figure annual benefit is possible.

Pets at Home is now rolling out AI to other parts of the business. If AI does the more mundane work, says Hewish, it frees up staff to do more of the things they are passionate about. On the shopfloor, this might mean interacting with customer’s pets.

“My message to business leaders,” says Hewish, “is carve out an innovation team to look at AI, this technology is coming soon.”

Staff training videos: Spirit Airways

Generative video AI can be a very useful tool for large organisations that want to streamline their internal company messaging.

A good example is American low-cost airline Spirit Airways, which has 13,000 employees. Its HR team need to communicate company policies like wellbeing and benefits to staff who are constantly on the move – often up in the air, in fact.

So, it uses tech developed by UK AI firm Synthesia that can automatically generate videos presented by an avatar, purely from text. It means that airline cabin staff end up watching videos similar to the safety ones customers are used to.

There are several benefits to generating instructional videos this way. It is fast, easy to translate into different languages and effective. Younger employees in particular are more used to consuming information through video.

“Switching from text to video has significantly boosted our engagement,” says Stephanie Diaz, Spirit’s director of health and wellness. “Creating videos is no more difficult than assembling slides and reviewing them is faster since it skips in-person review sessions.”

Cutting crime: Tenby Stores

Businesses of all sizes are finding practical uses for AI tech. Fiona Malone runs Tenby Stores in north Wales, a convenience store that also includes a Post Office.

Its long, sprawling layout makes it an easy target for shoplifters, a growing epidemic in the UK. “Crime is on the rise, lots of people think it’s fine just to take items from shops and not pay,” says Malone.

Malone has started using a new AI-powered tech system provided by x-hoppers, which creates a staff communications system that is integrated with CCTV.

AI analyses live camera footage to detect typical movements and patterns of behaviour associated with shoplifting. For example, it will send an alert to staff if someone grabs an item from a fridge and conceals it in their clothing.

Since installing the tech Malone says she has “detected a huge number of thefts” in her shop. “Before we installed the technology we were looking at wastage of around £26,000 per year and that has been dramatically reduced,” she says.

Simplifying travel bureaucracy: Curzon Relo

Curzon Relo is a tech platform that helps people when they are relocating between countries for work, study or personal reasons. It employs a network of specialist human consultants based around the globe to help solve the headaches of switching countries.

The company uses AI platforms like Ocean AI, explains CEO James Moss, to structure the practical requirements of moving.

“We might use it to check the current visa requirements for the Cayman Islands, or what banking documents are needed,” explains Moss.

Some countries have very particular visa requirements, even requiring people to report in person to a police station on arrival, he points out. The AI tools function as a “double check” against the local knowledge of their human experts.

“But we will always use AI as a tool for humans,” says Moss, “we don’t want a chatbot experience for customers.”

Catching the counterfeiters: SproutWorld

SproutWorld is the brand behind a novel kind of pencil. It’s known as the “plantable pencil” because it contains a plant seed at the base, so that when it has come to the end of its life, it can be buried in soil to grow a new plant.

Students at MIT in Boston came up with the idea to highlight the concept of sustainability. It has been promoted by celebrities from Richard Branson to Barack Obama.

Danish company SproutWorld owns the patents on this original product in major international markets and has been making the pencil for just over a decade now, generating millions of pounds in revenue.

However, it has also been the victim of its own success. The market has been flooded with copycat versions of the product. Many are made in China, India and Turkey, and sold online on platforms like eBay, Amazon and Alibaba.

SproutWorld has recently turned to AI-powered software made by RedPoint to fight counterfeiters. The tech scours the internet for counterfeit designs and typically finds 60 per week. It then automatically generates legal notices to the vendors. This is effective against around 90 per cent of those suppliers, making them cease activity, says SproutWorld.

During 2022 and 2023, the number of patent infringements spotted leapt by 30 per cent, the company says, and the enforcement rate jumped by 365 per cent.

In one case, a luxury hotel in Europe was notified that it was giving out counterfeit pencils to guests and so destroyed its batch, ordering new official ones from SproutWorld.

“AI has been a gamechanger in the way we detect and hunt down counterfeits,” says SproutWorld’s CEO Michael Stausholm. “The impact the technology has had for an independent business such as ours is profound.”