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In 2024, artificial intelligence is shaping the business world on an unprecedented scale, promising to increase productivity and take operations to a new level.
However, with the proliferation of new tools, it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to understand exactly how AI can benefit their business, especially as recent reports have highlighted the many pitfalls of these new technologies.
Here are five business workflows you can optimize using AI to improve your efficiency and how to avoid implementation pitfalls.
1. Documentation of meetings and actions
For starters, one of the most immediate applications of AI systems is natural language processing (NLP), specifically speech-to-text transcription. In recent years, enormous progress has been made in the processing of different accents and in the recognition and translation of different languages.
Today, artificial intelligence can provide real-time transcriptions of conversations and, more importantly, meetings. This eliminates the need to designate a minute taker and allows everyone to fully focus on the meeting objectives.
Going further, AI tools can also generate meeting summaries, distilling the most important points and actions.
You should, however, still take a few minutes to review the transcript and summaries before filing them away and sharing them with your team after the meeting.
Related: 5 Tips to Help Business Leaders Make Sense of the AI Landscape
2. Copywriting
Next, AI can be a boon to your copywriters. Whether it’s the text for the latest edition of your newsletter or the next installment of a series of blog posts, AI can help writers structure and refine their work.
While you should definitely avoid unedited, purely AI-generated content (and the factual errors and biases they inadvertently propagate), AI-powered writing tools can help your writing team in many ways.
Writers of all genres have come to appreciate the help of bots when it comes to generating suggestions for titles and structures, proposing edits, and offering first-draft battering rams to overcome writer’s block.
However, it is crucial to create policies for your writers’ use of AI. Ultimately, you need to ensure that their outcome is defined by human creativity and feeling rather than a machine-generated mess.
3. Creating content on social media
Another workflow that can benefit from an increase in AI efficiency is creating content for social media.
In the creator economy, social media has become a cornerstone of any digital marketing policy. Whether you’re showcasing your services on Instagram, engaging customers in witty banter on X, or offering your users in-depth product tutorials on YouTube, content is key.
However, producing social media content, publishing it, and monitoring its performance takes time, skill, and effort. AI can assist your social media experts at multiple points in the process.
It can monitor social media platforms to provide content suggestions based on recent trends and challenges. It can generate caption suggestions and propose appropriate hashtags to maximize exposure. Going further, you can even leverage it to produce explainer videos using AI avatars or to generate graphics like YouTube thumbnails.
More importantly, though, AI can also analyze the performance of your content across platforms, uncovering large-scale patterns more effectively than any human.
Related: 5 Ways to Protect Your Business from the Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence
4. Accounting compliance checks
Accounting and bookkeeping are not exactly the favorite activities of many entrepreneurs. Especially when it comes to routine tasks such as expense documentation and compliance checks. This is exactly where artificial intelligence can come into play.
In the accounting industry, AI tools are useful for tasks such as categorizing transactions, spotting errors such as duplicates, matching data formats, and tracking price fluctuations. It can also reconcile bank accounts and statements. Additionally, when it comes to ensuring employee expense report compliance, it can recognize data from scans of receipts and invoices and then cross-reference it with corresponding transactions.
Overall, these features can help you speed up many accounting processes, as long as there are human experts in the process and evaluating reported errors and routine findings.
5. Productivity assessments
Finally, AI can help you improve your efficiency by identifying exactly which processes need improvement.
Analyzing company productivity as a whole, as well as the performance of individual agents, is a challenge, especially when operating on a larger scale. Artificial intelligence, however, is unmatched in processing large amounts of data and turning it into actionable conclusions.
You can implement it, for example, to examine your CRM and help center data and determine which approaches lead to the highest customer satisfaction and which agents are most successful in delivering that satisfaction. Instead, it will help you identify which team members are falling behind and need additional human support.
Related: I Tested AI Tools So You Don’t Have to. Here’s what worked and what didn’t.
Overall, AI has immense potential to increase the productivity of your business. Workflows such as meeting documentation, copywriting, content creation, accounting and productivity assessments can benefit from AI support.
However, as in any area of business where AI is applied, it is crucial to maintain human control and ensure that people, not machines, make the final decisions and shape the final creative outcome.