AI has become a major driver of innovation in countless areas of the business sphere. Used right, it has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of operational workflows, and increase productivity.
That said, here are five ways to leverage AI to streamline your business in 2024, and take your operations to the next level.
Automate communication workflows
To begin with, AI offers countless possibilities when it comes to leveling up communications.
Modern business communication platforms and call center solutions, for instance, offer virtual AI assistants to agents. During conversations with customers, these assistants automatically pull relevant records from your CRM to provide information and make exchanges more efficient. Some even monitor conversations and run a real-time sentiment analysis, then offer suggestions to agents when they get stuck or customers become frustrated.
Similarly, AIs are now capable of taking over certain types of customer interactions. When it comes to customers calling to get updates on orders, schedule appointments or update profile details, AIs are more than capable of handling these queries. This leaves human agents free to deal with more complex issues and increases overall customer satisfaction.
Transcribe, summarize and analyze conversations and meetings
Another way AI can boost your overall business productivity is by creating transcripts of meetings and conversations. This eliminates the need of assigning a participant to keep minutes. Plus, AI can also generate summaries of meetings, rounding up the most salient points and listing action items.
Going further, you can also deploy AI to analyze the effectiveness of conversations as well as the productivity of their participants. This can help you cut redundancies, limit overlaps and enhance the time management of individual team members. It will also let you identify which team members are struggling with their levels of productivity — and how you can best support them.
Facilitate copywriting
Next up, generative AI can help your team create captivating copy — for your website, promotional materials, email campaigns and social media.
While it would be a mistake to leave the writing entirely to text-generating tools, they can deliver great ideas, outlines and suggestions for first drafts. These elements can form a great basis for your writers and editors to work with. Instead of wracking their brains for blog title suggestions or white paper structures, they can focus on polishing text, fact-checking and fine-tuning calls to action.
Rather than replacing them, AI can serve as a valuable tool to elevate their work and gearing their skills towards creating content that resonates with your audience.
Social media marketing is a cornerstone of any business’ online presence in 2024. However, it also takes considerable amounts of time and work — especially because many social media platforms’ algorithms reward high posting frequencies. When it comes to scaling your content output and still maintaining a high quality of text, graphics and video posts, AI is invaluable.
You can deploy it for a wide variety of tasks, shaving off hours of work for your social media specialists. Drafting video scripts, creating thumbnails, crafting perfect image captions or turning a blog post into a video, AI can handle all of these tasks in a matter of minutes.
Plus, when it comes to video marketing on social media, AI avatars can even handle talking-head explainer videos and voice-overs for product descriptions.
Again, while this type of content output will need a human touch during the fine-tuning phase, generative AI can deliver some fantastic drafts to work with.
Speed up administrative processes
Finally, there’s admin — many entrepreneurs’ least favorite set of tasks — especially when it comes to bookkeeping and accounting. They’re both complex tasks and most companies outsource them to a dedicated bookkeeping business, or even hire an in-house specialist.
While this still remains necessary, AI can help automate many of the routine tasks that swallow up massive amounts of labor. This includes recording data, assigning it to the correct categories, and comparing accounts and bank statements.
Going further, bookkeepers and accountants can use AI to scan paper receipts and invoices, then automatically match them to the relevant transactions. This also goes for employee expenses, which AI can seamlessly compare with your business’ expense management policy.
Plus, it’s also possible to deploy AI to monitor prices among contractors, subscriptions and suppliers. It can then flag any irregularities and highlight economical alternatives.
Final thoughts
While AI cannot replace specialists like bookkeepers, customer service agents, copywriters or social media managers, it can help streamline the workflows of your team members and increase their efficiency.
Whether by automatically filing expenses and ensuring compliance, delivering a structure suggestion for your next blog post or transcribing a client call to file away in your CRM, AI can serve as a fantastic aide to level up your operations.
VentureBeat newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.