FIR 94: Therefore What Does COVID-19 Mean To MY Business ??

Financial Investing Radio

What can AI do to help small businesses with so many business failures taking place with COVID-19? There are plenty of stats around that quantify the number of businesses dropping. Understanding these stats is useful, but, it leaves us to ask: Therefore What? Therefore, what can AI do to help the business owner mount a massive plan to rebuild, and pursue the business vision that was once your??

Hey, welcome everybody. This is Grant thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so been thinking again, still this is really part two of AI combating COVID when you when you think about all of the all of the carnage, if you will, in terms of the impact of businesses, definitely the impact to human life has been horrific. But also the impact to the businesses as well. And all the people's lives affected by that. You start asking the question least I have, I've been thinking, what can I do to help small businesses with so many business failures taking place? due to COVID-19? Oh, here we are in the first of September, and we've got lots of credit, potential downstream problems coming to us. There are plenty of stats around we're going to take a look at some of those that quantify the number of businesses that have been dropping that have been falling by the wayside. Understanding the stats, I believe is useful. But it also leaves me to ask therefore what they're For what can I do? What can I do? What can I do with AI, as a business owner to mount a massive plan, to rebuild and to pursue the business vision that was once yours? What are the things that we could do?

So I don't want to just focus on here's all of the negative things happening. It's important for us to understand what's happening. But we also want to pivot forward and look to the future and say, therefore, what can I do to regrow and regroup from this. So first part, let's take a look at some of the stats going on. First one comes from Bloomberg, this is a report that came out is around the end of July, so it's about a month old. It indicated they actually were referencing Yelp. And with Yelp, they had shown that that there was more than 80,000 companies that had permanently shut down now that was during the period of March 1 to July 25. Have those 60,000 more local businesses, meaning they have fewer than five locations, about 800 of the small businesses filed for Chapter 11. Interestingly, there's a fair number that did not file for chapter 11. That's that's another another conversation. In any event, that that amount right there is up about 30% or more from last year during the same period of time. So that's a big number. That's a big shift. Let's look at another stat here. It says, you know, while the businesses you know, these small businesses are having these challenges, the firm's with fewer than 500 employees, and up accounting for about 45% of the US economic activity. That's quite a bit when you think about it. Almost half of all American workers come through these small to medium businesses. And here's another stat also from Bloomberg. It said hey, in June of 2020, there is a survey that showed that 31% of owners reported lower sales in the past three months, while 7% reported higher sales a year earlier. All right, you kind of expected that. All right. In the same survey, though only 13% of business owners said it was a good time to expand. Right? That's a dip from 24% a year earlier.

Alright, so fewer thinking, Hey, I'm thinking bullish about business right now. So that's not that's not too surprising. There's some interesting stats in terms of the businesses that have had impact, you know, largest impact, no surprise here, the restaurant sector took the biggest hit right there. Retail and shopping was the next largest beauty and then automotive and then down into event planning and that order in terms of order of of impact or level of impact, I should say. All right, that was from Bloomberg case. So that's one view of the impact of the small businesses end Jump over here. There's another report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And they just quickly they pointed out about 50% of small businesses have one to two months of cash available. There were some other stats to it came down to it was around 15% or so had three to six months of cash available. So cash is king, and boy if there's no cash coming in, and that's all we've got in terms of our runway, that creates, obviously a massive problem. So that's another issue. Of course, the question that leads me to think is, is there cash in the business that we're not getting access to? And I actually believe there is I believe that AI from my experience, we can use it to help us discover cash that's available. I'll talk about that in a bit. here's, here's the third area, a third report from CNBC. That came out in the end of June. Talking about the amount of help that small business owners had gained the the payment protection pro met or excuse me the paycheck Protection Program and the economic injury disaster loan program.

All right, those aren't easy to say, not easy to roll out anyway, they, they gave out nearly $630 billion in funding. And about one fourth of the small businesses that receive that funding are already considered or considering closing their doors. And of course, the question that comes up is, gee, how do I pay back? Right? And what's the implications? Right, will there be forgiveness if I do close my doors? That's a whole other topic as well want to shift the thinking? So that's a dark picture, right? But I believe that there's a bright future ahead of us as a people. And with that, I want to talk about some techniques where we see AI being used To combat COVID itself, and then we'll shift another segment as well. But just briefly in this segment, ai combatting COVID this particularly comes from a report focusing on Asia, right? And so what are different countries in Asia doing so there's Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, in this report. In this report, it pointed out the following places where they are gathering data, and that data is being used then for AI purposes. So I'll break this into piece first, where are they collecting the information or the data? Alright, so between those different countries, they're collecting it from places such as transportation systems, Immigration and Customs databases, obviously the COVID-19 databases so healthcare data, so multiple countries are using that data, mobile data, mobile technologies Right social media, credit card transactions, closed circuit television. So you know, security cameras, GPS on the car, and then wearable tracking devices. All right, so those that there was like eight or nine different locations, and you start thinking, Wait, what's the connection between that data and COVID and and something to help me address COVID related scenarios. So I'll just call out a couple of the so one of them is an AI based tool that facilitates targeting lockdown and reopening, right so in other words, it monitors where a person should be right of course, there's different cultures and and government policies. I'm not here to comment on those, but in any event, so using some of those trackable device data or mobile data, etc. If you're classified as a you know, you've got COVID then you are asked to stay within certain location. And there's some AI helping to monitor that.

There's other AI based tools in these countries being used to enable quick diagnosis and classification of patients, right. And we've seen some things. Yeah, here in the US. Some organizations doing some things like that. I'll mention one here in just a moment. And so that's a critical way and unnecessary way to use AI. All in all, there's some strict home quarantines for those that have COVID in those countries. And as a result, use of this data across all these different data sources that I had mentioned, are being applied. All right. So that's AI combating COVID nasia capturing a two part sort of a social cultural use of AI Hey, stay where you should. And then there's there's the approach that says, hey, we're gonna actually gonna try to diagnose, diagnose you better with that. All right. Talk about here in the US So, and I h launched a medical imaging technology using AI to fight code. This came out in the health analytics.com report. So the NIH rolled this out not too long ago, here comes a big acronym am idrc. So that's medical imaging and data Resource Center, what they're doing is they're utilizing AI, medical imaging, to course look for those assessment opportunities. And earlier that they can assess it, then then the better. Of course, they have the opportunity to help the patient with that. So they're gathering large repositories of COVID-19 chest images, and the idea there are courses. It allows the researchers to ask critical questions, and then ultimately to develop what the appropriate next steps are for the people. So that's a cool way to use AI, obviously to help people's lives. So the question is Therefore what? Right? So if you're a small to medium business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, you try to make it through this tenuous time where there's lots of companies that have been dramatically impacted negatively in lots of people's lives who have gotten sick with this.

Therefore, what does this mean to your business? So as a business owner, we need to at times, think as a researcher, right? We need to look for ways to evaluate your business data. How will you evaluate your business data? So just as those COVID researchers are certainly evaluating tissue data and asking critical questions? What business data will you evaluate? What questions do you have about your business now what this means to your business is that you should run some AI predictive analysis on your business information. In other words, turn your data upside down, inside out, look for the successful patterns that built your business. Many of them you know cognitively or empirically In other cases, you won't know them, right. And we want AI to be able to highlight those and make you aware of those. And just as it's important to understand what the positive patterns have been, also look for patterns that created negative growth, right? And the sooner you can discover them, stop doing them. Right. And so AI, there are some that you already know you don't need AI to tell you. But there are others where there are times where AI points out interesting patterns or behaviors, and you need to be apprised of those and stop bleeding cash in that happens. So if you want to learn how to do this, subscribe to the channel. Reach out to me, we'll have a conversation and we can help you get started with this. Don't forget the purpose, the mission and the vision for why you started your business. Hey, thanks for joining looking forward to speaking with you again.

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