Best Practice: 4 AI Methods for Enhanced Growth in Your Business

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Are you seeking practical and established methods to boost your business growth with Artificial Intelligence?

Here, I present 4 best practices you can start implementing immediately. This includes two methods that fundamentally optimize your core processes. Thus, AI can help enhance performance in small and medium-sized enterprises, achieving a noticeable competitive edge.

1. Leverage New AI Features in Established Tools

Your business likely already utilizes a range of established tools such as Microsoft Excel and Word for documents, Microsoft Teams or Zoom for video conferencing, Slack for communication, and Hubspot or Salesforce for CRM and sales, possibly even Personio or Leapsome in HR.

What you might not know is that each of these providers is currently enhancing their tools with Artificial Intelligence (AI). This offers the advantage that these tools are already established and familiar to your employees. They are used daily in routines and processes within your organization.

Integrating new AI features into these proven tools opens up simple and efficient ways to boost your teams' productivity with AI.

For example, the Copilot feature in the Microsoft Office package of MS Teams: The AI automatically logs every video meeting, creates summaries, captures action points, assigns responsibilities, and outlines next steps. All in real-time. Zoom offers a similar feature with its AI Companion. Imagine the immense productivity boost this can bring to your teams!

As a leader, ensure that you and your team leaders are informed about the latest AI features of these tools. The market is evolving rapidly, and new AI features are added monthly. Make sure these features are accessible to your employees – which might mean adjusting your current subscription models.

Every employee should be familiar with these new AI features and trained in their use.

I recommend actively promoting the use of AI features in tools like MS Copilot, Zoom, Slack, and others throughout your entire organization.

Regular feedback from your team about the effectiveness of these new AI features can provide valuable insights into whether employee productivity and process efficiency are increasing.

This way, you can ensure your business remains at the forefront of technological development and leverages all the benefits that AI in proven tools has to offer.

Officially Regulate the Use of ChatGPT

In the world of Artificial Intelligence, chatbots like ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, or Google Bard have established themselves as tools for productivity enhancement.

These are based on generative AI and so-called Large Language Models (LLMs), with ChatGPT probably being the most well-known.

Many employees use ChatGPT in a legal gray area to boost their productivity at work – whether it's for creating texts, summarizing documents, or analyzing data. Surveys indicate that internal documents and protected data often end up in the chat.

Considering restricting access? There's a better solution. You can officially regulate access to chatbots. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, now offers special solutions for corporate clients. ChatGPT for Teams and ChatGPT Enterprise. Using this pricing model, your employees' inputs are not used for training the model, which offers enhanced data protection. Additionally, there's an admin interface and license management for all users in the company.

Another advantage: Your IT department can securely access the OpenAI API and use the LLM as an interface for other tools in the company.

By officially regulating access to tools like ChatGPT, you provide your employees with security and encourage the use of Artificial Intelligence throughout the organization. Every employee can then use ChatGPT in a regulated and secure framework for their daily work, contributing to an individual increase in productivity.

It is essential, therefore, that you as a leader not only support but actively promote the use of these innovative tools and integrate them into existing work processes.

This will ensure that your company fully exploits the benefits of AI and remains at the forefront of technological development.

3. Introduce Knowledge Chatbots

Knowledge Chatbots are a wonderful tool for making existing knowledge in the company available to employees and customers via chat.

Imagine ChatGPT with secure access to your company's collective knowledge.

The benefits are immense. An employee wants to know how to apply for special leave? They ask the chatbot. A customer wants to know about the new features of your product? They ask the chatbot. The head of the sales department needs the latest sales figures in France? They ask the chatbot.

The Result

Firstly, the questions are answered. Secondly, (even better) the questions were answered automatically.

Valuable work time is saved and can be allocated to more relevant tasks. No HR worker has to explain the process of special leave for the hundredth time. No support agent has to personally introduce the customer to the use of the product. No sales employee has to export and prepare the needed data. The Knowledge Chatbot powered by AI does it all.

Implementing such systems can be complex, but there are also simple use cases you can start with anytime. Alden Do Rosario from CustomGPT recommends a Knowledge Chatbot for customer support as the "Lowest Hanging Fruit in GenAI".

The underlying principle of this technology is both fascinating and effective.

Knowledge Chatbots are operated with so-called RAG systems ("Retrieval-Augmented Generation").

Specific company knowledge is broken down into relevant information units (chunks) and stored in vector databases. When a question is asked to the Knowledge Chatbot, it searches the vector database for thematically relevant information units and formulates an answer based on this information. The result also includes references to the source documents, making it verifiable.

The applications for Knowledge Chatbots are varied and can represent an enormous added value for your company. Employees can quickly and easily inquire about HR processes in chat. Customers have the opportunity to ask specific questions about using your products in chat – essentially a "Talk to your Manual". And managers can ask for the latest sales figures in the sales area via chat and promptly receive the desired information.

4. Accelerate Core Processes with AI Microservices

Now, I come to one of my favorite topics: AI Microservices. AI Microservices are an excellent method to sustainably, flexibly, and highly individually integrate generative AI into your core processes.

As an entrepreneur and leader, you optimize your company for efficiency, productivity, and innovation. AI Microservices are like thousands of little helpers, invisibly doing the work in the background, thus automating entire process steps.

But what does this mean in concrete terms? Here are three examples:

AI Microservice for Evaluating Customer Feedback

Imagine you and your employees could access structured management summaries of all customer feedback at any time and automatically.

An AI Microservice for customer feedback can identify customer needs and problem areas and generate summaries. The microservice can use sentiment analysis, thematic clustering, and trend analysis. By recognizing irony and language diversity, you get comprehensive insights into customer opinion at the push of a button. This promotes data-driven decisions and supports the optimization of product and service.

AI Microservice in Product Development

Or consider the possibilities in product development: An AI Microservice specialized in image recognition can be used to automatically analyze design drafts and provide feedback. This significantly accelerates the review process and allows your engineers to focus on creative product development instead of spending hours on manual analysis.

AI Microservice in Sales

Another illustrative example: An AI Microservice can analyze current sales data, predict sales trends, and provide personalized recommendations for cross-selling or upselling strategies. This allows your sales team to make more targeted offers and significantly increase sales figures. Every sales employee thus has a small team of virtual "AI colleagues" permanently supporting them with specific evaluations.

By integrating AI Microservices into work processes, you can not only increase efficiency in your company but also improve the quality of work for your employees. You relieve your teams of routine, time-consuming tasks and allow them to focus on their core competencies and creative processes. At the same time, you offer your customers faster, personalized service, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Why do I believe AI Microservices will have the greatest impact on your company's performance? They are simple, flexible, and highly customizable. Depending on the need, you can add, adjust, or scale specific services without having to rethink the entire system architecture.

This means for you as a company, you can quickly respond to changes and integrate AI very individually into your core processes.

Fairly, I must also mention that integrating AI Microservices into the existing IT landscape can be laborious, especially at the outset. The AI Microservice only works if technical interfaces in your IT are available and access to relevant data exists. However, the initial effort is worth it: Once established, the microservice can be maintained and scaled with minimal effort.

Conclusion

The methods presented represent best-practice approaches that companies can confidently adopt to optimize their processes and promote growth.

Entering the world of Artificial Intelligence is easier than ever, thanks to the integration of new AI functions into already established tools and the official regulation of access to advanced chatbots like ChatGPT.

These steps provide a solid foundation and quick wins on which to build further. However, the real performance enhancements and securing of competitive advantages arise through the strategic use of Knowledge Chatbots and AI Microservices.

These advanced methods enable companies to fundamentally transform their workflows and increase efficiency and productivity. Thus, the methods presented not only show how easy it is to start with AI but also how companies can sustainably benefit from its consistent application.