Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the blessings of the century, especially its applications within the workplace.
The technology comes with various mind-blowing capabilities that help employees increase their productivity and save time on mundane tasks.
Slack recently surveyed 18,149 workers and found that the most productive ones are 242% more likely to use AI in their work than the less productive ones.
Image via Slack
By using AI, employees can get more work done in less time to drive more business impact.
To know more about the power of AI, read on to discover how this technology can help increase your business productivity.
The Role of AI in Modern Businesses
Many organizations across various industries are using AI to boost business productivity. By leveraging AI-powered tools, businesses can automate workflows, increase efficiency, and boost employee motivation.
Below are the top ways businesses are using AI to stay productive.
1. Content Creation
Businesses across industries use content to engage their audiences, attract potential customers, and convey their brand message.
To stay competitive, you’ll have to produce a lot of quality content to maintain a strong online presence and prove your expertise in your niche.
However, along with the quality content you also need to maintain the right balance of text and visual content. You need to include images, videos, GIFs, and other types of visuals to make your content engaging.
Manual visual creation takes a lot of effort but thanks to AI-powered tools such as Adobe AI Image Generator that can create images from texts quickly. Now if we are adding images, we would also require some videos. The need for videos may also place a significant strain on your content team and you may find yourself seeking help externally.
However, Generative AI can help you create more content easily and reduce the strain on your employees. According to a McKinsey report, Generative AI can increase your productivity and reduce spending by between 5 and 15%.
Below are a few ways to use AI to improve the productivity of your content team:
- Research content ideas: The content team can use AI tools to research ideas for the content they’ll create. The tools will help you find trending topics and unique angles to make your content pop.
- Automated proofreading: It takes a lot of time and effort to edit and proofread written content. To save time and ensure quality content, your employees can use AI tools to identify and correct errors and inconsistencies within the content.
- Content repurposing: After creating content for one platform, your employees can use AI content tools to repurpose it for other platforms. For instance, after writing a blog post, you can use an AI tool to quickly repurpose it for social media.
2. Contract Management
Contracts are a crucial component of any business. Companies use contracts to outline agreements, formalize relationships, and outline how those relationships will be maintained.
However, the contract management process is often a source of risk and frustration, especially when handled manually.
According to DocuSign, the consequences of poor contract management are:
- Wasted personnel time
- Increased cost
- Higher compliance risk
- Delay in closing deals
- Misunderstood contract terms
Image via DocuSign
All the consequences listed above significantly affect your business productivity. When your employees have to spend a lot of time manually managing and reviewing contracts, they are diverted from more strategic revenue-generating activities.
Luckily, AI has revolutionized contract management by automating many of these processes. AI-powered contract management tools can help you:
- Speed up contract review by highlighting the key aspects of an agreement
- Collect the necessary signatures faster
- Generate contract documents quickly using pre-designed templates
- Conduct thorough contract analysis to uncover hidden opportunities and unseen risks
These actions will ensure your contracts are well-managed, thereby helping your team save time, reduce unnecessary costs, and ultimately boost business productivity.
According to Attrock, DocuSign is one of the best AI-powered contract management tools for businesses. However, it is important to note that there are other worthy alternatives with similar or even better features.
Make sure you choose one with powerful AI capabilities and great automation features to improve efficiency and productivity.
3. Customer Service
Another effective way to use AI to boost business productivity is by using AI chatbots for customer service.
Customers expect the brands they buy from to deliver an exceptional customer experience and one way to meet this expectation is by responding quickly to their queries.
However, businesses that rely on the traditional format of customer support are finding it hard to handle customers’ queries and concerns across multiple channels.
But with AI-powered chatbots, you can handle multiple interactions simultaneously to ensure your customers don’t wait too long to have their issues resolved.
These bots work 24/7 to answer frequently asked questions. You can also utilize AI commenting on your social media profiles to respond to comments and answer questions.
Most AI tools can escalate serious issues to your customer support team to ensure prompt resolution.
One company that has been using AI to boost business productivity through automated customer support is DeSerres. During the pandemic, the brand witnessed a spike in customer requests.
To address online queries quickly without overwhelming their customer support reps, they brought in HeyDay, a HootSuite AI chatbot capable of responding to queries in English and French.
Image via HootSuite
This investment in AI for customer support proved highly beneficial for DeSerres because in just four months, the chatbot:
- Engaged in 108,000+ conversations
- Assisted 95% of users to track their orders without any human involvement
- Helped the organization automate 90% of their conversations
4. Data Analysis
AI can also help you analyze your business data quickly and more efficiently, thus improving productivity. Organizations that collect a lot of data have a hard time analyzing and generating insights from all the data they have.
Typically, an employee has to go through all the data and try to extract insights from it. This is a long and tiresome process, rife with the potential for human errors and inconsistencies.
AI-powered data analysis tools excel in this arena. They can process data at remarkable speeds, identify trends, and reveal insights that might be challenging for humans to detect.
By liberating your employees from the burden of manual data processing, Artificial Intelligence transforms employee engagement by allowing them to focus on more meaningful, strategic, and engaging work.
Concerns About AI
While AI can help revolutionize your business, there are several aspects that you should pay attention to before choosing to go ahead with the implementation. Here are some potential drawbacks of AI and how you can solve them:
- Hallucinations: Generative AI tools tend to hallucinate, meaning they might provide incorrect information. That’s why it’s critical to fact-check everything that AI generates before you publish it.
- Ethical implications: AI platforms tend to inherit the biases of the humans who have developed them, despite best efforts to avoid them. So, when you use AI for fields like customer service, you must ensure that it doesn’t impact your customer relationships.
- Inaccuracies: AI models can give inaccurate outputs at times, which could make a huge difference when it comes to data analysis. So, it’s essential to keep cross-checking your AI-driven data analysis for best results.
Conclusion
As technology continues to evolve, Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a key driver of enhanced business productivity. AI-powered tools will help you automate workflows, save costs, and complete tasks faster using fewer resources.
As you contemplate how to use AI to boost business productivity, remember that the possibilities are vast. Identify the tasks you struggle with the most and find ways to use AI-driven solutions to optimize them.
Have any further questions on this topic? Feel free to leave them in the comments.