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In 2024, AI is shaping the business world at an unprecedented scale, promising to boost productivity and take operations to a new level.
However, with the proliferation of new tools, it can be hard for entrepreneurs to grasp exactly how AI can benefit their business, especially since recent reports have pointed out multiple pitfalls of these new technologies.
Here are five business workflows you can optimize using AI to enhance your efficiency and how avoid implementation drawbacks.
1. Meeting and action items documentation
To begin with, one of the most immediate applications of AI systems is natural language processing (NLP), especially voice-to-text transcription. In recent years, enormous advances have been made in the processing of different accents and in the recognition and translation of different languages.
Today, AI is capable of furnishing real-time transcripts of conversations and, more importantly, meetings. This eliminates the need to designate a note-taker and allows everyone to focus fully on the objectives of the meeting.
Going further, AI tools can also generate meeting summaries, distilling the most important points and action items.
You should, however, still take a few minutes to check over the transcript and summaries before filing them away and sharing them with your team post-meeting.
Related: 5 Tips to Help Business Leaders Make Sense of the AI Landscape
2. Copywriting
Next up, AI can be a boon for your copywriters. Whether it’s copy for the latest edition of your newsletter or the next installation of a blog post series, AI can help writers structure and polish their work.
While you should absolutely avoid purely AI-generated, unedited content – and the factual errors and biases it inadvertently propagates – AI writing tools can aid your writing team in many ways.
Writers across all genres have come to appreciate the help of bots when it comes to generating title and structure suggestions, proposing edits, and offering first-draft battering rams to break through writer’s block.
Nevertheless, it’s crucial to create policies for the use of AI by your writers. Ultimately, you must ensure that their output is defined by creativity and human sentiment rather than machine-generated pablum.
3. Social media content creation
Another workflow that can benefit from an AI efficiency boost is content creation 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 giving your users in-depth product tutorials on YouTube, content is key.
However, producing social media content, posting it, and monitoring its performance takes time, skill, and effort. AI can assist your social media experts at multiple points throughout the process.
It can monitor social media platforms to make 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 graphical elements like YouTube thumbnails.
Most importantly, though, AI can also analyze the performance of your content across platforms, unearthing large-scale patterns more effectively than any human.
Related: 5 Ways to Protect Your Company from AI Pitfalls
4. Compliance checks in bookkeeping
Bookkeeping and accounting are not exactly many entrepreneurs’ favorite activities. Especially when it comes to routine tasks such as filing expenses and compliance checks. That’s exactly where AI can come in.
In the bookkeeping business, AI tools are useful for tasks such as categorizing transactions, catching errors such as duplicates, matching data formats, and tracking pricing fluctuations. It can also reconcile accounts and bank statements. Plus, when it comes to ensuring compliance in the expense reports of employees, it can recognize data from scans of receipts and invoices and then cross-reference it with the matching transactions.
Overall, these capabilities can help you speed up numerous bookkeeping processes – as long as there are human experts in the loop and assessing flagged errors and routine output.
5. Productivity assessments
Finally, AI can help you enhance your efficiency by pinpointing exactly what processes need enhancing.
Analyzing your business productivity as a whole, as well as the performance of individual agents, is a challenge – especially if you operate on a larger scale. AI, however, is unparalleled at processing large amounts of data and distilling it into actionable conclusions.
You can deploy it, for instance, to go through 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. Conversely, it will help you spot which team members are lagging 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 like meeting documentation, copywriting, content creation, bookkeeping, and productivity assessments can all benefit from AI support.
However, as in any business area in which AI is applied, it’s crucial to keep human oversight and to make sure that it’s people, not machines, who make final decisions and shape the final creative output.