By now, AI’s supposedly revolutionary ability to supercharge productivity is a well-established talking point. However, when it comes to adoption, concrete examples sway fence-sitters better than marketing speak.
This article aims to provide just that: several tangible ways in which AI can start making an impact and why investing in it now makes sense, regardless of company size.
How Does AI Boost Efficiency in Day-to-Day Workflows?
While each segment of a business will benefit from a specialized set of AI tools, they amplify the team’s capabilities. Having an AI strategy frees up resources, lets you do more with less, and leverages insights humans alone couldn’t uncover. The following is just a surface-level overview of the transformative benefits.
Automation
Eliminating rote tasks is among AI’s most universal contributions to boosting efficiency. Whether it’s issuing an invoice or setting up a social media post in time for maximum engagement, AI-backed automation tools give your human workforce more time to focus on strategic or creative thinking while also guaranteeing error-free execution.
Customer support
Claiming that AI chatbots are shifting the paradigm in customer support is no exaggeration. They’re available 24/7 and can communicate via text or voice, meaning customers have more agency when reaching out for help. Today’s chatbots are sophisticated enough to accomplish entry-level tasks such as guiding customers to sign up for a new service or help them troubleshoot common issues. Fewer human agents can then perform oversight and tackle more complex inquiries.
Content creation
LLMs and generative AI have transformed the way in which businesses generate content. In the hands of skilled creatives, they can accelerate brainstorming and amplify output while staying true to your brand without degrading quality. Marketing might benefit the most, but content generation is also useful internally. For example, LLMs excel at providing summaries and providing the baseline for materials like SOPs or onboarding procedures that humans can then refine quickly.
Data analysis
The fusion of AI and analytics leads to at least three tangible benefits that underpin any business’s efficiency and resilience. These are data unification, faster, better-informed decision-making, and vastly amplified predictive potential.
Unification means that integrated AI can process data from siloed sources like CRMs and internal spreadsheets and point out connections that would have otherwise remained hidden. Since it’s gotten so good at interpreting language, employees can simply ask the AI data-related questions and quickly get pertinent answers without having to sift through reports.
Most notably, predictive analytics can provide the edge needed to outmaneuver the competition or expand your presence. It leverages a combination of historical and real-time data along with trend tracking to anticipate demand or pick up on signs of customer churn early enough for decisive countermeasures.
What Would Your Business Gain by Investing in AI?
There’s no company, regardless of size, that cannot benefit from AI adoption. That said, related considerations and priorities differ based on the size of your business.
A smaller, less diverse workforce is a top limiting factor for small business growth. AI can empower employees to juggle multiple responsibilities, even when their skill sets in some of them might be lacking. Using chatbots to take the load off your graphic designer, who has to double as customer support due to the team’s lean staffing, would be a good example.
Mid-sized businesses are usually more established, meaning there’s a greater chance of data fragmentation and key employees as the only carriers of institutional knowledge. In these cases, AI does the most good by enhancing operational efficiency. Use it to automate rote tasks, build up process documentation, and execute data-driven decisions faster.
Enterprise-level businesses prioritize resilience while maintaining and deepening the advantages they managed to accrue. To that end, they may need custom or even in-house AI tools capable of custom scenario modeling and analyzing a large number of data points to arrive at unique insights. Small savings gained by optimizing thousands of processes make a significant difference at this scale, as does reducing error rates.
