In an interview with Forbes, Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer and Executive VP of Design & Emerging Products, Scott Belsky, said Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “reimagining and refactoring every function of an organization.” He’s not alone in this belief: Business leaders across a diverse range of industries predict that AI tools have the potential to upend many daily business functions.
For many, the lesson is simple: Learn how to work with AI tools or fall behind. In PwC’s 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey, 46% of executives reported investing in AI to help differentiate their organization, products, and services. And a whopping 73% said they plan to use generative AI to change their company’s business model!
With the power to perform a plethora of tasks and exhibit behaviors commonly thought to require human intelligence, AI tools are learning to emulate human cognition — and the technology is quickly improving.
Rather than following explicitly programmed rules like yesterday’s algorithms and automation solutions, AI learns from datasets, patterns, and experience. It exhibits intelligent capabilities like reasoning, learning, perception, language processing, planning, and even creativity.
These new AI systems enable your business to leverage AI assistants to increase efficiency, power more data-driven decision-making, and allow greater adaptability and scalability in real-world applications. From sales and healthcare to engineering and finance, AI is a valuable solution for almost every industry and in many ways represents the future of business operations.
What is the role of AI in business?
Many businesses have used various automation tools, chatbots, and generative AI solutions for years. As early as 2019, over 52% of telecommunications organizations used chatbots. But today’s AI solutions consist of advanced technology that can enhance automation in nearly every role, team, and department.
Most commonly, AI-powered tools can automate repetitive tasks, taking mundane, time-consuming duties off of employees’ plates so they can focus their energy on more innovative, strategic work. For example, AI models can help finance teams by automating invoice processing, while AI-enabled customer service can respond to tickets 24/7 and even boost customer engagement.
New advancements in AI technology have improved the versatility of its functionalities, making AI assistants more capable than ever before.
For instance, because AI can integrate with multiple platforms, you can seamlessly incorporate AI across your business’s existing systems and tools. This allows you to streamline cross-application workflows, reduce the need for manual effort, and enable greater efficiency and cost savings.
Meanwhile, AI can better understand complex tasks with improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). It goes beyond simply automating routine activities to function as a real-time partner and provide proactive assistance to teams in every department of your business.
How businesses have used AI
In 2017, only 6% of U.S. companies used AI technology to produce goods and services. Today, that number is steadily growing, with the most significant use of AI among large manufacturing, IT, and healthcare companies. When it comes to how businesses have been using AI, the leading use cases are customer service, marketing and sales, data analysis, operations, HR, and IT.
When it comes to the major players in the AI space, we have to consider the case of NVIDIA, now widely regarded as the clear winner of the AI industry. This is primarily due to NVIDIA’s forward-thinking — its early investments in graphics processing units (GPUs) cemented its current status as a critical player in AI applications. .
Over two decades ago, Amazon did the same in the world of ecommerce. In 1998, the now ecommerce juggernaut implemented item-based collaborative filtering, enabling it to scale personalized product recommendations to millions of customers.
Like NVIDIA, by prioritizing AI investments at the early stages as one of their key growth initiatives, Amazon was able to change the game in ecommerce and solidify its competitive advantage for years to come.
AI assistants: The future of AI in business
AI assistants improve automation by augmenting its capabilities. Most notably, AI assistants can leverage large language models (LLMs) to understand, analyze, and process vast amounts of data and better support business operations.
The term “AI assistant” can describe a large range of AI capabilities, such as performing specific tasks and answering queries based on user inputs. Overall, an AI assistant’s goal is to support users and enhance productivity conveniently.
However, the term “AI assistants” typically refers to a specific type of AI assistant that functions more like a partner than a simple chatbot. Often used in enterprise settings, AI assistants are built to understand context and support a wide range of tasks across different roles and departments.
An important feature with many AI assistants is the chat interface, which enables employees and customers to easily communicate and collaborate with an assistant . With conversational AI capabilities, users are able to speak to AI assistants in everyday language, while their assistants use AI to personalize interactions and provide tailored assistance. For example, they can support specific employee and customer needs in specialized areas, like support, enterprise search, or content creation.
Benefits of AI assistants in business
AI assistants can help optimize nearly every business function. They seamlessly integrate with your business's existing systems and technologies to increase workflow efficiency, boost productivity, enable data-driven decision-making, and strengthen adaptability.
Increase efficiency and productivity
With advanced automation, AI assistants can automate repetitive tasks to streamline workflows and remove mundane, time-consuming duties from employees' plates. This is made possible by Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing(NLP), which AI assistants leverage to analyze inputs, understand context, and make informed decisions about how to support employees.
Plus, today’s AI assistants are capable of integrating with the tools and systems your employees use daily, like Slack or GSuite, enabling AI tools to understand your entire business context and better meet your unique needs. By working within these existing tools, AI assistants help minimize adoption hurdles and eliminate the learning curve, allowing employees to bypass the hassle of mastering new interfaces.
In turn, your employees can realize immediate productivity gains, free up time to focus on innovation, and set themselves — and your business — up for long-term success.
Improve decision-making
Advanced AI solutions are not just capable of automating basic tasks — they can also help strengthen decision-making.
Advanced AI solutions can process vast amounts of data in real-time, using data analytics to identify patterns, behaviors, and anomalies that humans might miss. By uncovering these insights, AI assistants can recommend the best course of action to help teams make more intelligent, data-based decisions.
Some AI assistants are ‘agentic’, meaning that they can even take action autonomously. For example, an AI assistant monitoring system health can detect system outages, automatically send alerts to your IT team, and initiate issue resolution. As a result, you avoid prolonged system downtime, which could cost your business up to $1 million per hour.
Plus, automating tasks like data analysis minimizes the margin for human error, which can have an outsized effect on business outcomes. Consider this banking slip-up, which misplaced $900 million, or a trader’s input mistake, which led to a $322 billion loss in market value and $78 million in fines. Businesses can minimize the risk of costly human mistakes by automating error-prone tasks.
Strengthen adaptability
Notably, most AI assistants are not static tools. Instead, they can use Machine Learning and Reasoning to adapt to evolving automation needs, identify patterns, and capture user preferences. Some leverage system interactions to learn from each request, refine responses, and improve over time. For businesses, this ability to evolve and self-improve is critical for long-term adaptability and scalability.
An AI assistant’s ability to scale is unique. With advanced AI capabilities that enable learning and self-improvement, they can easily adapt to growing data volumes and complexity without requiring manual updates.
AI assistants' capacity to integrate with diverse systems and languages enables them to support growing companies to ensure greater consistency and efficiency in processes regardless of geography. In turn, AI assistants make it easier for your business to scale operations and pivot quickly in the face of changing market conditions.
5 AI assistant use cases and examples
AI assistants can seamlessly integrate into diverse existing systems, helping your business increase operational efficiency, boost productivity, and improve decision-making and adaptability across diverse tasks, roles, and departments.
There are hundreds of use cases for implementing AI assistants, ranging from human resources and sales to finance, engineering, and IT.
1. Human resources
HR teams, employees, and sometimes even job candidates can benefit from AI assistant support in human resources activities such as talent acquisition, onboarding, compliance, and employee support.
For example, an AI assistant can support HR teams by screening potential candidates, automatically scheduling interviews, and enabling improvedensuring compliance with company policies. Meanwhile, AI assistants can facilitate welcome tasks and deliver easy access to onboarding resources to help support new employees.
At the same time, these intelligent assistants can automatically answer employees’ questions about benefits, payroll, vacation policies, and other related topics, giving them faster, more personalized responses with less downtime.
As a result, AI assistants relieve HR teams of repetitive administrative tasks so they can focus on more complex activities and strategic initiatives for employees and job candidates.
2. IT operations
AI assistants can support IT teams by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, freeing up teams to work on more strategic activities.
For example, AI assistants can manage IT ticket routing, automatically categorizing and prioritizing IT tickets to make sure they get assigned to the right team members. In many cases, AI assistants can even take action to resolve issues autonomously. It’s a win-win — IT teams get monotonous work taken off their plate, and employees get faster answers to their queries.
Additionally, AI assistants can help IT teams manage and provision, smoothing onboarding processes by automatically provisioning devices for new employees. The intelligent assistants can further alleviate IT teams’ mundane workloads by managing hardware updates, monitoring cybersecurity alerts for fraud detection, and empowering employees to use self-serve tools for common issues.
3. Finance
In the finance department, AI assistants can help teams save time, increase efficiency, and boost productivity by supporting activities like expenses and reporting.
For example, AI assistants can automate approval for expenses to speed up workflows and reduce the need for manual intervention. They can also lend a metaphorical hand to streamline reporting by ensuring accurate, timely data retrieval.
Outside of the finance department, AI assistants can help all employees with basic financial queries. For example, employees can turn to an AI assistant for help updating personal financial information like direct deposits or tax details. They can also use the assistant to access tax information or get help resolving payroll issues.
Once again, the benefits are twofold: Employees get the help they need faster, and your finance department spends less time working on mundane administrative tasks.
4. Engineering
AI assistants can also play an important role in supporting engineering teams. By integrating with your business’s existing tools and systems, AI assistants enable searches across diverse documentation, specs, and repositories, helping your engineering team access the information they need.
Similarly, AI assistants give engineers quicker, more reliable access to up-to-date information, like product uptime stats and on-call schedules, taking the hassle and headache out of everyday workflows. AI assistants also prove handy by providing alerts for system outages, performance issues, and system changes, helping ensure engineering teams respond promptly to critical issues.
5. Sales
AI assistants’ advanced automation solutions can also help sales teams enhance engagement by facilitating customer communications. Through the use of intelligent conversational AI, sales teams can leverage AI assistants to deliver automated responses and follow-ups to prospect inquiries.
This helps employees communicate consistently and ensure timely responses. Employees can even receive automatic alerts when a contract is signed, or a payment is received to stay on top of communications and processes.
Beyond communications support, your sales team can turn to AI assistants for research. Rather than painstakingly digging through customer details, sales reps can quickly search all customer data from an always up-to-date CRM via an AI assistant.
Get advanced automation capabilities with Moveworks AI Assistant
With the ability to integrate seamlessly into your expanding array of systems and technologies, AI assistants are uniquely positioned to meet the needs of modern businesses.
They can provide automation across your entire tech stack, consolidate resources to help employees get the quick support they need, and automate a variety of business processes. This, in turn, reduces employees’ workloads and enables swift scalability without taking on additional human resources or costs.
The Moveworks AI Assistant is primed to support every employee in your business, from human resources to IT, finance, sales, and engineering. With our AI Assistant, you can automate a wide range of everyday tasks, supporting your teams with analytic capabilities and intelligent, data-driven decision-making to drive greater adaptability, efficiency, and productivity.
In other words, Moveworks’ AI Assistant is more than a simple interactive assistant — it’s an invaluable solution that works alongside your team as an intelligent partner.
Most importantly, Moveworks’ AI Assistant can scale with your business to ensure consistent performance and user satisfaction now and in the future. AI assistants are the future of AI in business, and as history has demonstrated, early adopters will prevail.
Learn more about how global enterprises like yours get more done with Moveworks AI.
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