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😺 Our top #9 AI use cases

😺 Our top #9 AI use cases

PLUS: #5-9 might surprise you...

Grant Harvey
August 18, 2024

Welcome, humans.

There’s a lot of fretting about whether or not AI has peaked. The hype is everywhere, but what's really happening on the ground?

For instance, 83% of companies say that AI is a “top priority” in their business strategies. But who is actually using it? And how? And is it working?

It turns out, for many companies across lots of different industries, AI is already reshaping operations, strategies, customer interactions, and a lot more.

Check this out: a new survey from Deloitte found 79% of business leaders reported “full-scale deployment” for “three or more” types of AI applications.

We want to take this Sunday to break down the 9 most popular AI use-cases that companies have actually adopted.

So let's explore the top use cases where industry leaders are putting AI to work.

They are:

Writing emails.
Data analysis.
Writing code.
Auto-updating CRMs.
Journalism.
Advertising.
Financial analysis and management.
Customer service.
Call transcriptions, summaries, and follow-ups.

At the end of the Deep Dive, we want to hear from you—what AI is your company actually using? And how has it helped you? Let us know in the poll at the end of this article!

The 9 most popular AI use-cases that companies have actually adopted.

Now let’s take a look at each of these close-up, with examples:

1. Writing emails.

No matter who you are, if your job involves any outbound communication, you probably have to write emails. One of the #1 ways employees at major companies use AI is to speed up their email drafting.

Here’s an example from Reddit:

Instead of using a generic template, or writing it yourself, you can enter a relatively short prompt and get a less time consuming, less generic email draft in seconds.

And good news for AI-generated email recipients—a recent study found AI emails were perceived well! They achieved the writer’s goal, and came across as confident and professional.

Email marketers were seeing a big boom in AI-drafted emails as early as September 2023. A report from MarketingDive found:

57% of marketers surveyed in large companies (500+ employees) are now using AI for email campaigns (2x more than 2022).
99% of marketers using AI for email campaigns report positive results.

2. Data analysis.

We’ve noticed there are a lot of startups raising big funding rounds to solve the “enterprise data analysis” problem with AI. And that’s not even counting all the other companies who now offer those tools as part of their already popular SaaS products.

But are companies actually using these tools?

It turns out, over 48% of companies have used AI to address “data quality” since 2020—long before ChatGPT hit the scene back in 2022.

That’s because “cleaning” dirty data is one of the hardest, most time consuming parts of the job. And this is something AI excels at.

For example, AT&T has tackled the problem of mind-numbing data entry with AI since 2015. Today, it has 3,000+ automation bots that it says:

Save the company 16.9M minutes of manual effort per year.
Created hundreds of millions of $$ in value.
Netted out a 20x ROI.

Claude Artifacts is another new tool that many analysts are using to create snapshot dashboards out of their data, directly in the browser.

Check out this demo for examples of what you can do with it—pretty awesome!

3. Write code.

A recent study found that software developers have the highest workplace adoption rate of ChatGPT at 78%. According to Github, that number is even higher (92%).

While there’s been a ton of debate over whether or not new programmers should use AI…the irony is that most devs do use it in some capacity.

According to Github:

Software devs see AI tools as productivity enhancers, burnout preventers, and upskilling aids.
57% of developers believe AI improves their coding skills.
87% of developers reported that GitHub Copilot helped preserve mental effort on repetitive tasks.

So how are devs using AI? Primarily as a code assistant for tasks like:

Analyzing and identifying errors.
Optimizing programs.
Providing code suggestions.

One of the best parts of coding with AI is you can see instant results, whether using Github CoPilot or Claude’s artifacts feature, which can demo what you’re coding directly in the browser.

Even still, many devs argue that while AI is helpful, it doesn’t actually save them time…yet.

4. Auto-updating CRM.

New research from HubSpot found that besides AI chatbots, the second most popular AI tool was AI-enhanced CRMs (customer relationship management software tools).

It turns out, 25% of marketers are using AI-enhanced CRM and marketing tools, including HubSpot themselves.

As a result, HubSpot reported that sales reps spent 28% less time on data entry thanks to tools that auto-update their CRMs.

Plus, 43% of managers whose teams invested in AI say it’s returned a somewhat positive ROI.

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5. Journalism.

While a lot of writers are opposed to AI out of fear of losing their jobs, there’s a less vocal group of them that’s actually using AI in their work.

In fact, a study found there are many journalists (we’re talking 55-65%) already using ChatGPT to analyze news items, suggest topics to cover, and draft articles.

AI can of course generate drafts of articles, suggest changes, and provide ideas for future stories. It is already used to summarize news content, suggest new topics to cover, and even translate news articles from international sources.

Here’s some other cool ways AI is being used in the news right now:

Investigative reporting, where AI assistants discover information inside massive datasets, such as the Panama Papers (a huge data dump of wealthy elite tax evasion docs).
Transcription, where AI is used to transcribe recorded interviews or audio content.
Text-to-speech, where AI-generated voices can read articles to users, making news accessible on phones or to visually impaired individuals.

6. Advertising.

A new study from Forrester found that 91% of U.S. ad agencies already use generative AI or are testing it. These agencies are using generative AI to improve productivity, speed up creative processes, and enhance data analysis and reporting.

Here’s how ad agencies are using AI:

Using AI to help come up with new ideas for ads or campaigns.
Creating different versions of ads that can be changed based on who's seeing them.
Boiling down complex data about who's watching / reading ads.

7. Financial analysis and management.

AI is used in finance, too.

In fact, AI tools are used all over finance, whether it’s for quant trading, algo-trading, automated trading; name a trade, and there’s probably an AI for it. However, these are usually highly specialized models and not chatbots or generative AI like ChatGPT.

That said, generative AI is starting to pop up in finance in new areas. JPMorgan Chase has a new AI assistant that helps its employees with drafting emails and reports. It’s called the LLM Suite, and 60K employees have access to it. Plus, the company plans to train all new hires on the tool as well.

JPMorgan has already reported to have reduced between 2-4 hours of work a day with the tool, and thinks AI in general could create $1.5B in value this year.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs each have their own internal AI models, too.

8. Customer service.

A lot of companies are using AI to supplement customer service. One stat aggregator found that customer services is actually the #1 use-case for how companies are incorporating AI in the workplace.

Of them all, Klarna (the buy-now-pay-later company) might be the most well-known of the bunch…and the most notorious.

That’s because the company said that its AI chatbot did the work of 700 customer service agents in a trial run…and then laid off 700 people. And since then, it froze new hiring (because of the productivity gains).

Another big name, Microsoft, recently announced it will roll out AI in its own call centers, with the goal of assisting call center employees to find information faster—not replace them (so they say). The hotel industry is also using AI to assist reps instead of interface directly with customers.

This use-case (assisting reps) seems the most common, especially now that there’s some high profile lawsuits targeting companies whose customer service bots gave out wrong information.

Even still, plenty of companies are trying out new AI-customer service tools, like Eventbrite, Substack, Bilt, and ZenDesk.

9. Intelligent call analysis.

Finally, the last use-case companies are actually putting into practice is AI-powered transcription and analysis.

We mentioned Morgan Stanley earlier—the company’s new Debrief chatbot is all about intelligent call analysis for financial analysts.

Debrief’s stated mission is to record, transcribe, and summarize the key points from the 1M+ conference calls Morgan Stanley employees dial into every year.

Sounds nice, right? But if you’re not a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, you can’t use it.

Luckily, there’s other companies developing tools you CAN use…

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Attention’s customers are leveraging its team of AI assistants in their workflows right now for analysis of all their sales calls.

Here are a few examples:

Competitive Intelligence: When a competitor is mentioned during a call, Tessa will automatically send timely and targeted follow-ups with collateral highlighting how your company's product differs.
Insight Summaries: Tessa generates daily or weekly 5-minute summaries of the most interesting elements from the week, like new use-cases, pain points, or market trends.

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The bottom line? AI is definitely being put to work, and it's already in more places than you realize.

Now, we want to hear from you: Is your company using AI in ways we haven't mentioned?

Has it made your job easier, harder, or just... different?

Let us know in the poll below!

Remember, while AI might take over some tasks, it's still no match for human creativity, empathy, and the ability to create (and appreciate) a good meme.