Transcription
Hello and welcome to my way or the AI way. I'm Scott Davidson. I'm on a mission to master AI and I'm using this podcast to document my journey and to share what I'm learning.
Now, this week, what I wanted to cover were the six business use cases for AI. This comes from a report released by Open AI just recently. It's called Identifying and Scaling AI use cases. I'll put a link to the report in the show notes. It's based on a study of over 2 million chat GPT business users. And there's a lot of good information in the report, but the part I found most helpful was the way they've categorized business use into these six buckets. I think it's a really good way to look at AI.
So, if you're a business owner or if you're a manager and you're thinking how can I apply AI at my business, this gives you a good overview of the different ways it can be used, the different use cases. Or if you're a bit of a AI explorer, experimental like me and you've been playing around for a while now, you'll probably be able to see the areas where you've already started using AI and hopefully it'll help you identify some new ideas and areas where you could be using AI.
So, I'm going to talk you through each of the six different business use cases and I'm going to provide lots of examples of how that use case applies across different parts of the organization. So different job roles, different departments or different functions within the business. So it should give you a really good overview of all the different ways you can already be using AI. I hope you find this really useful. There's a lot of information in it. So let's get stuck in.
Okay. So I've actually created a presentation for this episode which I'm going to be running through and this is mainly to keep the episode on track and to make sure I cover each of the six use cases. So if you are listening to this, don't worry. Uh, there's not a lot of information on the slides and I'll be reading it all out anyway, but it was an opportunity for me to try a new AI tool that I've been meaning to try. It's called Gamma.app.
As you know, I've mainly been using chat GPT. And this is one area where chat GPT perhaps overestimates disabilities. It will often offer to create a presentation for you at the end of a chat. It will say, "Do you want me to put that into Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint?" and it can actually create a PowerPoint file that you can download, but it doesn't do any of the formatting. So, you just get a very basic layout with the content in there. So, it's not actually creating the presentation for you.
So, if you are someone who's creating a lot of presentations, you're probably still using Google Slides or PowerPoint, and those tools are starting to have more and more of the AI integration into them. But there are also tools that have been built specifically for AI to build presentations. And probably the most popular one is gamma.app and that's what I used for this. So it was a chance for me to try that product and test it out. I really time boxed it so I only spent an hour on this but I found it to be a really intuitive and quite a powerful product and it's free or certainly the version I'm using is free. Obviously they have caps on certain things you can do but I was able to do this whole presentation within an hour to a pretty high level with no prior knowledge of gamma.app. So, it's a good tool. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. And if you're doing if you're wanting to do AI based presentations, that's that's a good one to try out. But that's not the focus of today's presentation. We're here to talk about the six business use cases.
So, let me talk you through each of these one at a time. Uh, and if you if you are watching it, you'll see the slides and that that will explain why each of the slides are sort of random designs because I was just been playing around with it really was the main objective.
So number one use case and is content creation and this is probably where most people are first introduced to chat GPT. This is where it became quite popular at generating copy for emails or at writing copy. It's really good at that and that's one example of content creation but it goes beyond that. So let's look at some of the examples across different departments.
Obviously if you work in marketing and a lot of the work I do is in marketing AI can be used across your whole job function. So, it's great for writing emails, social media posts. You can now start to do images and design mock-ups using AI as well. So, it's really good at that. And even recently, you can start to do videos using the Google VO3 product. And soon, Chat GPT will do much the same. So, you can create multi-media, different modes of content using AI. As I say, that's one of the main functions I've been using it for. I would say it's made me at least five times, probably 10 times more productive. You know, an email that used to take an hour can probably be done in 5 minutes. So that that's literally a 10x improvement in productivity. And yeah, you can get a lot more done in the same amount of time to a very high standard using AI for marketing. So if you are in marketing and you're not starting to use AI, you need to be.
But it's not just marketing who can who have to do content creation. There are other departments and functions across a business such as the product team can be using AI to build product requirement documents. It's really good for writing documents to a really high standard or maybe for drafting user guides. A lot of that really content heavy work can now be done or assisted using AI.
Sales people can be using AI to obviously to generate sales emails or to write scripts that they use on calls and in pitches. And as I'm showing today, it can also be used to generate your slide decks or your presentations using AI. So very good for sales people. Lots of uses there.
And then HR, I mean HR need to write job descriptions. They need to write a lot of policies, standard operating procedures. Any of those sort of documents can be sped up and assisted using AI. So right across a business, content creation is important. And AI is a really good tool for content creation. And that's the first business use case that was mentioned in this document.
The second one is research. And again, this is something that is used across most job functions. And I first started using perplexity. A lot of people were using perplexity for this. And it's a really good tool for web-based research. So, it basically goes and does the Google searching for you and then compiles a summary of all the different sources with references of where it got the information and provides an overlay of sort of commentary on that. And it's really powerful at doing web-based searching. You know, things that used to take probably a few hours can be done in a few minutes with a single prompt. And it's now been integrated into the other tools as well. So, chat GPT now has a deep research mode which does essentially the same thing. And it it it's really powerful for that sort of research.
But there's other examples as well. So let's have a look at this again looking at different functions and different roles. Sales and marketing, you might be using AI to investigate new industries or to conduct competitor analysis, which is really important and it's it's really good at doing that. Again, HR, you could be using this AI tool to research industry trends, get benchmarks, or even for looking for potential candidates, doing a lot of research for the HR role.
The product team could do research by analyzing user feedback and comments. There was an example in the report of match.com who are doing mock simulated focus groups using AI. So they've they've essentially created different personas of their users and they're able to pre-est products and ideas really quickly and really cost effectively. I've done a lot of focus groups the traditional way in the past and it it's a great way of getting qualitative insights but it's very time consuming very expensive and wasn't really accessible to most small businesses whereas now you can create a simulated focus group using AI and it's a great example of how product teams can be doing research that wasn't previously possible and IT people IT departments they need to do a lot of vendor analysis so doing research on that using AI is a really good use of this technology.
Number three, the third use case is coding and this is an area where it really has made a big impact on the development industry, the developers. The tool that probably got the lead on this was Claude. Claude is used by a lot of developers. It's it's an LM tool much like chat GPT, but it proved really popular with writing code. But essentially all of them now do this. So it's just another form of content generation. Just as you can use it to write copy in whatever language you want, it can also write code to a to a really high standard. So it's it's had a big impact on developers.
Here's some stats for your software developers. GitHub stat is that 92% of US developers now use AI coding tools. That was in 2024. So pretty much every developer is now using AI to assist their coding. Microsoft recently reported that over 30% of their code is now AI generated and they're one of the biggest generators of code and software in the world and now 30% of their code is written using AI. So it shows you the impact there. And a McKenzie study found that software engineering is in fact the top function that is impacted by AI with they're saying potential productivity gains of 20 to 45%. But I'm hearing other developers say they can now use one developer to do the job that 10 developers used to take. So it's it's clearly going to have a big impact on developers as a job function. Um, and at at this stage, it's a really good tool for your developer team to be using to be more productive.
The other thing AI has done is it's really opened up coding to other roles and other functions where people are not technical coders. They don't know how to write code, but they can now effectively write code using chat GPT or other other AI tools. So product teams for instance can now do what's called vibe coding where you're just prompting the AI using natural language and it writes the code for you and you're able to knock up really good interactive prototypes of a product and actually show people what you've got in mind. And again that's something that used to take a lot of time and a lot of resource and often wasn't possible. You'd have to be pitching a product idea based on a concept. you can now actually develop that to a pretty high standard with no coding knowledge and show it. So it really opens up a lot of opportunities for product teams and entrepreneurial people to start developing applications and products and software and marketing could be using it to write some basic SQL queries for data analysis. Your finance team, they could be creating Python scripts to automate parts of the monthly close. So whilst it's obviously going to have a big impact on developers roles, it's also sort of leveled the playing field and and made coding possible for other non-technical people as well. So both a threat and an opportunity there, but lots of ways that you could be looking at coding across your business.
The fourth use case is data analysis. And this is a really important function for most roles, but it's often something that was either people didn't have the skills or the resources to do data analysis and you would often be just going on gut instinct. Really, there's no excuse for that now with AI. You can be using data analysis in whatever role you have within a business.
Again, lots of marketing is databased and this just allows you to upload data from various sources. It will summarize key insights. It can help you visualize that data and it really makes you a lot better at your role as a marketer to be able to use more data to make database decisions. Product teams obviously use use data to analyze trends looking at user friend feedback. Again, you could upload information from your CRM data to try and surface product ideas. It's really good at looking at huge amounts of data and synthesizing it into some key insights. AI is fantastic at that.
Sales teams, we had Tim on the podcast um a while ago and he talked about how he was using it in his sales roles. Again, sales is a data-driven function. So, you can be using AI to make you better at your job by analyzing CRM data to find your strongest accounts. You could be analyzing your pipeline to identify the hottest leads. And it really makes data analysis accessible to any salesperson. And obviously a finance team um they they use a lot of so using AI to quickly analyze expense data to look at trends or to cross reference and merge data from lots of different multiple sources. I think it's really good for that as well.
The fifth use case is ideation and strategy. Now, this is one where once I started using AI, this was one of the things I found really surprised me is how good it is as a brainstorming partner and again doing a lot of work in marketing. I'm using it a lot to brainstorm ideas to sort of get a lot of that value you used to get of working in a team. Even if you're working by yourself now, you can bounce ideas off it. And often in the creative process, more brains are better than one. So, you can use AI in that way to in the sort of ideation phase.
And then when you get to the strategy phase, it can actually write a lot of the documents for you. So it can generate a really good marketing plan if you give it the right brief and the right context and the right information. Or you can take an existing marketing plan, upload that and ask it to tell you what's missing or to analyze and make suggestions. And it does a really good job of that. So it's really raised the bar on quality, I would say, in this case. Obviously, it's making you more efficient, but it's also making you better at your role as a marketer.
Product teams, they could use AI to map user journeys or to generate new product ideas or product names. And sales teams can be using AI in the ideation phase to practice your pitch against personas of your ideal client. And that's a really effective way to be using it as a salesperson. So ideation and strategy is a really strong business case for AI. And as I've shown there, whichever role you're in, there's probably a way you could be using it to improve your ideas and to improve your strategy.
Now, the sixth and final use case mentioned in the report and probably the one I haven't yet really delved into is automations. Um, this is perhaps not as sexy as some of the other content base, generating new ideas, new creative stuff. This is more about automating repetitive processes or repetitive tasks. So whilst it's not sexy, it can be a real cost saver for businesses, but more importantly, if done correctly, you can automate a lot of the tasks which will allow you to focus on the things either you enjoy more or you're better at. But it is probably a bit more developed or a bit more complicated than the previous five use cases. And we're just sort of getting there now where it's getting more accessible to most people to be able to do some basic automations using chat GPT. But where this is really going to come into play is with the introductions of AI agents which is happening now and we'll be able to automate more and more of the tasks functions and whole job roles within a business.
So again looking across a business where could you be looking to benefit from AI automations marketing customizing email sequences can be done using automation that you can automate a lot of your reporting. So it's automatically sending you data each week based on the prompts that you've given it. In the product team you could be summarizing and sharing weekly customer insights and automating that process. The finance team could obviously be automating a financial reporting and preparing executive reviews. So automating that whole function that often takes a lot of manual labor. And then HR could be looking to automate some of their processes like staff onboarding, uh, scheduling reminders, and obviously taking meeting notes is is kind of an example of this now where, you know, tasks that used to be quite manual can now be done at the click of the button and it'll it'll prepare meeting notes based on a Zoom call and distribute that to all your people.
So automations is a really interesting area that I think is really important to business users and I'm going to be getting I'm looking for some guests to come on the show and really talk us through in more detail how automations can be done cuz I think this is the next area that I'm going to be looking at and probably a good area for business users to be looking at or if you just want to be more efficient and productive in your everyday life, there's probably tasks and functions you can be automating using AI. So stay tuned for more information.
So those are the six business use cases. Just to um summarize those, number one was content creation, number two was research, number three coding, number four data analysis, number five ideation and strategy, and number six automations. So I hope you found that overview useful. I certainly found it really helpful to think of it in those buckets. And as a business user, there's lots of different ways you you can see there of how you could be using AI. So, I hope you found that episode really helpful. And if you did, please share it with someone else who may find it helpful. Leave your comments and as always, follow the show, give it a rating. It really helps a lot. Until next week, thank you for joining me on this journey to learn more about AI. I'm Scott Davidson, and this is my way or the AI way. [Music]