Artificial intelligence-powered tools are of increasing value to businesses, from the smallest to the largest, yet most companies have barely begun to scratch the surface of what AI could do for them.
Almost any computer-related or online activity can benefit from AI tools and software, so let’s take a look at what is available.
Search tools
Bing Chat and Google Bard, for those who have access to it, are free to use and perform tasks such as searching for suppliers and parts, and undertaking research. The former generally comes up with three answers rather than the almost infinite number of conventional search and can reply to a broader range of questions in a more contextual way. The bots address users in a conversational manner and can deal more abstract and subjective questions as well as giving purely factual answers.
Companies are using specialised search tools to generate new business. Off the shelf applications can produce large datasets of new leads and verify phone numbers and email addresses. The databases use AI to crawl all over the internet to file data about relevant companies.
AI-powered personal assistants, such as Alexa, Siri and Cortana, are useful for voice search. However, Microsoft has ended Windows support for Cortana as it shifts investment and focus to Bing Chat. These assistants can recall financial data, such as sales or revenue figures, produce meeting agenda and take notes while people are on the go. They can transcribe dictated emails and texts, check them for accuracy and send them.
Marketing tools
AI is highly suited to marketing activities because of its huge data processing powers and ability to mimic human interactions. It can be used to generate copy for campaigns, emails and website landing pages, and write articles and social media posts.
Another area that is catching on is text to video creation. This involves training and marketing copy, for example, being transformed into videos narrated by lifelike avatars. These characters could be the likes of teachers, TV presenters and sales staff. Programmes offer multiple languages so videos can be presented in international markets. Text to speech converters are also available. PDFs, emails, documents and articles are fed into the system and come out as natural-sounding voices.
Video editing, too, can be automated by AI. Users edit their scripts, and the AI makes the changes to the video itself. Another use is reducing running times – the AI will have a go at selecting the best and most relevant parts of of a longer video and produce a shorter one at the required length. And there’s no need to record a voiceover – the programme will do it.
Website building programmes can do all the necessary coding and help with design, often using templates. Generative AI will create what is needed based on the information they are given. A basic site can be put together in a matter of minutes.
AI tools can help businesses find the best keywords to rank high in search results by assessing keyword difficulty: that is, how difficult it is using those keywords to get on to the first page of Google results. They can also provide figures for the monthly volumes of those keywords.
Using the software, marketers can check the SEO metrics of top-ranking sites and get help finding keywords that have lower difficulty scores relative to their traffic potential.
Smart newsletters can be set up in as little as a few minutes and handle content generation, choosing subject lines and adding links to advertisements and affiliates. The technology reads a company’s website, then compares that to its content database and uses both to write the email copy. The newsletter content is based on the best-performing parts of the company’s site.
Increasingly, chatbots and messenger apps are handling routine communication, whether with employees or clients and customers, typically via texts, emails or chatbots. They can dealing with basic enquiries, track deliveries and give product information. The best ones admit they are robots, explain the limits of what they can do, and ideally allow recourse to members of staff when things get too tricky.
Workflow Tools
Microsoft Power Automate (known as Microsoft Flow until 2019) is part of the company’s Power Platform range of products. It uses low-code platforms to automate a range of tasks and integrates with the Microsoft programme suite.
The software builds bots that can take over repetitive mouse movements and keyboard entries – something that is known as robotic process automation. For example, it can be programmed to always save certain email attachments in a particular folder or send a notification if a certain word related to a company was retweeted more than a set amount of times.
Alternative include Zapier, which can be connected to ChatGPT and thousands of other apps. Again it can create automated workflows for often-performed tasks, for example, bulk preparation of images for a website. They can be programmed in natural language rather than coding languages.
Companies are turning to writing assistants to create blog posts, emails, marketing copy, advertisements, press releases and other more routine content-creation activities. The apps are given keywords to work from and can check spelling, reformat for different purposes and translate the text into different languages.
Accurately recording meetings is a laborious and error-prone activity that AI can help with. Meetings can be recorded and auto-transcribed by means of voice recognition software and summaries of key points can be generated. Software is available for in-person and online meetings, and videos of meetings can also be transcribed.
As well as being useful for search, AI-powered personal assistants can take over secretarial functions such as providing reminders and alarms, setting up meetings and sending routine messages and emails.
AI tools are an increasing part of customer relationship management. They analyse data about customers and their behaviour to provide personalised recommendations and offers. Using natural language processing companies can talk to customers and leads in various channels and offer them personalised content.
CRM software will also analyse customer data and behaviour to suggest follow-up actions, and is able to gauge customers’ outlook on their products and likelihood of buying them and respond to potential buyers accordingly.
Obviously this is no more than a brief guide to AI tools for business and further articles will cover the different areas in more detail.
