How Businesses Can Use Generative AI to Improve Productivity

Automate Routine Menial Tasks

For any business that has not automated its operational workflow, plenty of time is expended on routine menial tasks. There are plenty of AI tools out there that can take these tasks off the hands of employees, saving them time to focus on more high-value responsibilities.

Tasks like drafting standard emails, summarizing meetings, extracting information from documents, putting in the entries for various types of records, creating reports, and classifying customer inquiries.

For example, a business can use a tool that accepts receipts in digital or scanned form, and puts the data from them into customer invoice records. This type of tool can reduce manual effort, speed up processes, and improve productivity.

However, even if the tasks seem menial, you cannot fully leave it at the hands of AI. Even for such tasks, human supervision will be necessary, albeit less frequent.

Improve Communication

Generative AI can help business improve their capacity to communicate globally. Whether it’s internal communication or external communication, it can make passing information clearer, faster, and more consistent.

Most businesses have some sort of IC(Internal Communication) software to keep their work cycle correspondence smooth. Most of these platforms are generative AI-driven.

Let's say an employee used such a platform to attend a video meeting. During the meeting, it can take meeting minutes, transcribe communication, and even live translate.

After the meeting, they would be able to produce a concise written summary, provide a summary or identify key decisions, and create a list of assigned tasks, which can reduce miscommunication and ensure accountability.

In written communication, such softwares can help draft emails and may even work as sentence rewriters, adjust the tone of writing depending on the audience, create and refine reports, translate messages, and summarize lengthy discussions.

These platforms can reduce time spent on communication and make communication more effective, but will require routine testing, and any messages should be reviewed shortly before being sent out.

The latter is particularly important when confidential information, sensitive clients, or important business decisions are at stake.

Generate Content

Every type of content needed by a business can be produced using generative AI. Anything from writing needed for daily operations to content for marketing can be produced.

The tool is already being used by content marketers around the world for creating blog posts, writing for advertisements, video scripts, product descriptions, and social media updates.

The process for this can be as simple as using an LLM to create a draft for content, then using an AI detector to find which parts sound particularly robotic, to humanize them. They can even use a humanizer to make the robotic bits more natural. While they may not be able to automate the whole process, it will still help them produce content faster.

The sales team can use generative AI for proposals, presentation outlines, follow-up emails, and responses. Human resources can use it for preparing job descriptions, onboarding guides, training materials, workplace policies, and internal announcements.

For operational purposes, it can be used to draft official documents, meeting agendas, research summaries, reports, executive briefings, and contracts. Not everyone is a writer, technical or otherwise.

This makes writing accessible to all, helping employees become more productive and get things done faster.

Enhance Customer Service Experience

Generative AI can help businesses respond to customers faster when they reach out for help, while providing a more personalized experience.

AI-powered chatbots can be present to customers 24/7, providing answers for common questions, product information, offering support at any time, and guiding users through purchase. They can also provide step-by-step text support to users, empowering them to troubleshoot without a human agent.

By analyzing customer inquiries and preferences, it can curate messages, recommendations, and solutions according to individual needs.

Many AI customer service agent systems offer a seamless experience, where it can smoothly move the conversation to the relevant human agent when it is required or requested.

The tool can act like an assistant to the agent, providing a summary of the problem or the history of the conversation, and offering suggestions, helping enhance productivity. It can even identify recurring complaints and suggest improvements to products and services.

However, since this customer-facing AI deals with personal data and deals with sensitive issues, it needs to be closely monitored. 

Analyze Business Data and Support Decision-Making

One of the biggest boosts to business productivity that generative AI can give is through analyzing large volumes of business data and turning them into clear, usable insights.

The tools can identify sales patterns, customer behavior, operational performance, employee productivity, and financial activity much more quickly than manual data analysis.

People can use it to summarize performance reports, detect anomalies and unusual changes, compare results across time, and identify inefficiencies in the various operational processes. Using these insights, the business can improve anything from inventory management to service quality.

Employers can even use it to understand how productive employees are being, and what is hampering productivity. Such insights can guide overall decision-making through the various layers of business operations; however, the final say should always be with humans.

Even when insights tell a certain story, AI won't be able to understand the fundamental human reasons and contexts within operations, which will have to be evaluated by supervisors.

These insights can only support the situation, because the final say will lie with the leader's critical evaluation and professional experience.