10 Ways GenAI Helps You Work Smarter

For some people, the speed of generative AI progress has outpaced their comfort zone, while those who’ve experienced its benefits embrace it with zeal. But one thing is undeniable: Generative AI (GenAI) is revolutionizing how we work across every industry and every part of the organization, and businesses are experiencing significant improvements in productivity, performance, and quality as a result.

In research results from three quantitative studies, users saw an average performance increase of 66% as a result of utilizing GenAI in their work. These studies examined a range of users, from less-skilled workers to experienced professionals, each working in different domains. The results consistently showed notable productivity gains, along with improvements in the quality of work.

By focusing on real-world usability and quantifiable outcomes, GenAI can transform how people work, streamline tasks, and enable new levels of efficiency and performance.

Harnessing the collective brilliance of humans and GenAI

GenAI is not a replacement for human intelligence and talent but rather a technology that amplifies human capabilities, enabling individuals and teams to accomplish more and make better decisions.

If you asked people who’ve been using GenAI to facilitate their work whether they would willingly return to pre-AI days, it's more than likely that you'd get a resounding “no”.

"We talk about standing on the shoulders of giants sometimes, and I think what AI is really doing is letting us stand on more shoulders and see a lot further" —Dr. Rankin, The Human Side of AI.

By embracing what artificial intelligence has to offer, businesses can empower their workforce to work smarter, achieve greater productivity, and drive success.

In this article, we explore ten real-world ways GenAI can help you maximize productivity and innovation, starting today.

1. Customer service

The customer experience field has been among the first to embrace GenAI, and has led the charge in many aspects of its adoption in business.

Utilizing GenAI enables the customer service team to focus on more complex issues and deliver a better customer experience. In one study, customer service agents who utilized an AI tool could handle 13.8% more customer inquiries per hour. Compared with the performance with agents who relied solely on traditional methods, the AI-assisted group demonstrated significantly reduced response times and improved customer satisfaction.

Here are a few specific examples of how GenAI can support better customer service:

• Advanced chatbots and virtual assistants—The latest GenAI-driven chatbots can understand context better, handle complex conversations, and provide more accurate responses to customer queries.

• Personalized customer interactions—GenAI can analyze a customer's past interactions, purchase history, and preferences to generate personalized responses and recommendations.

• Proactive customer support—Using predictive models, GenAI can anticipate customer issues before they occur and proactively reach out to customers with solutions or advice

2. Sales

Sales were among the early adopters of GenAI, prizing its usefulness in enabling them to accomplish much more, and faster.

Following are some of the ways sales and marketing teams can leverage GenAI:

• Personalized engagements—GenAI is revolutionizing the way sales teams engage with prospects and customers, enabling them to personalize their engagements, analyzing customer needs in order to better recommend and target products.

• Increased responsiveness—With the support of GenAI, sales reps can access up-to-date product information in seconds to help them answer customer questions accurately, generate quotes faster, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Better lead qualification—GenAI can automate lead qualification utilizing criteria such as demographics, engagement, purchase history, and more, enabling sales staff to better assess prospects' needs and where they are in the sales cycle and maximize their conversion rates.

3. Marketing

Although there was some early trepidation about how GenAI could impact their jobs, marketing professionals who have used GenAI tools now recognize GenAI as a vital support tool rather than a replacement for their skills and talents. In a 2023 HubSpot survey, 90% of content marketers who use GenAI said it’s an effective tool in their content creation, providing inspiration for topics and helping with first drafts of emails, blogs, and email marketing.

GenAI offers many benefits for marketing professionals. Here are just a few:

• Market analysis and prediction—By analyzing historical data, market trends, and consumer behavior, GenAI can help marketers predict future market trends and consumer behavior to inform their organization’s marketing strategy and get ahead of market shifts.

• Consistent, personalized, on-brand content—GenAI helps marketers create customer communications that hit the right tone and message for each audience. Because GenAI can be trained on vast datasets, it can crunch data and generate in-depth persona insights, helping writers create content that's more relatable and relevant to the target audience.

• Less time writing, more time strategizing—GenAI can help marketers produce more content, faster, while maintaining the quality of their work. One study found that on average, business professionals who used GenAI could write 59% more business documents per hour.

4. Human resources

GenAI tools streamline HR processes such as recruitment, onboarding, and performance management. By leveraging AI, HR departments can enhance candidate assessment, automate administrative tasks, and provide personalized employee development plans.

Here are more ways HR can benefit from GenAI:

• Employee onboarding—HR teams can use GenAI to provide a personalized onboarding experience for new hires, generating tailored onboarding instructions or materials based on the new hire's role, department, or personal preferences.

• Responding to employee questions—AI-supported 24/7 HR support can ensure employees get quick answers to HR-related questions, regardless of time zone.

• Employee engagement and satisfaction surveys—HR managers can use AI to assess employee engagement—for example by analyzing their employee culture amp survey data to understand the results more quickly, thereby enabling a faster response. GenAI can also generate customized surveys to gather more targeted feedback.

5. Financial analysis

Generative AI opens up new possibilities in financial analysis, boosting accuracy, efficiency, and predictive capabilities.

Following are just some of the ways GenAI can support better financial analysis:

• Customer spending analysis—Generative AI can analyze customer transaction data to generate insights into customer spending habits and financial behaviors. This can inform decisions around product offerings, marketing, and customer engagement strategies.

• Financial forecasting—GenAI can analyze historical financial data, market trends, and other relevant factors to generate more accurate financial forecasts. This can inform decisions related to budgeting, investing, or risk management.

• Risk assessment—Generative AI can analyze multiple financial indicators, market trends, and economic factors to assess financial risks, such as credit risk, market risk, or liquidity risk.

6. Product development

GenAI provides valuable insights into customer preferences, enabling businesses to develop targeted and innovative products. By leveraging AI, companies can deliver products and services that better meet customer needs.

• Personalization and customization—By analyzing individual preferences and demographic trends, GenAI helps product developers customize products at scale and cater to niche markets in order to provide a better customer experience and increase loyalty

• Faster product development—GenAI speeds up the product development process by rapidly generating and evaluating design alternatives, utilizing user feedback, market trends, and performance data to suggest optimized designs.

• More efficient product design—GenAI can optimize product designs for supply chain efficiency by considering factors such as material availability, cost, manufacturing capacity, and logistics.

7. Legal

Gen AI can help legal teams go from reactive to proactive.

With GenAI's ability to swiftly access information on jurisdiction-specific laws and scan documents for compliance issues, legal teams can complete compliance checks with ease. GenAI-powered risk assessments can efficiently highlight potential legal risks in critical business transactions such as mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships.

Here are more specific examples of how GenAI can assist legal departments and lawyers:

• Chatbots for legal advice—Law firms can use GenAI to create chatbots that provide basic legal advice—for example, to guide users through common legal issues like creating a simple will or handling a traffic ticket.

• Legal document creation and review—GenAI enables the creation of legal templates for commonly used documents such as non-disclosure agreements or employment contracts, saving time and ensuring consistency. A GenAI app can also review legal documents such as leases and contracts based on policies and requirements, quickly identifying key points of concern, and providing a summary. This can quickly add up to thousands of hours saved in contract reviews and negotiations.

• Legal research for better predictive analysis—Because GenAI can sift through vast quantities of case law, legislation and legal commentary, it can significantly improve efficiency in legal research. For example, a GenAI app can analyze historical court case data to predict the likely outcome of a legal dispute based on past similar cases.

8. Workflow automation

GenAI-powered automation tools streamline repetitive tasks, reducing manual workloads, minimizing errors, and enabling employees to focus on higher-value tasks that require creativity and critical thinking.

Following are just some of the ways GenAI can improve workflow automation:

• Data entry and validation—GenAI can automate data entry and data validation. It can be trained to read and understand different types of data input and cross-check entries for accuracy.

• Invoice processing—GenAI can be trained to process invoices by reading and understanding invoice data from various formats, verifying the details, then updating the financial system.

• Automating email responses—Customer support teams can use GenAI to tailor email responses based on the content of the email received from the customer, resulting in better customer service and time savings for the support team.

9. Supply chain management

GenAI optimizes supply chain operations by analyzing data, predicting demand, and identifying bottlenecks. Businesses can enhance inventory management, reduce costs, and ensure timely deliveries.

Consider these GenAI use cases for your company:

• Demand forecasting—GenAI can analyze many factors such as historical sales data, seasonal trends, and market conditions to generate accurate demand forecasts, helping companies optimize their inventory levels, reduce stock outs or overstock situations, and improve customer service.

• Supplier selection—GenAI can analyze multiple parameters like cost, quality, delivery performance, and sustainability practices to suggest the best suppliers for specific requirements or to generate a ranking of suppliers.

• Automated negotiation—Procurement managers can use GenAI to conduct negotiations with suppliers. For instance, it could generate an initial quote for a contract based on past negotiations and market conditions, then adjust the quote based on the supplier's response.

10. Cybersecurity

With cyber attacks rising sharply, GenAI is quickly becoming an indispensable element in fighting cyber crime. For example, by analyzing historical security event data and network activity, GenAI can predict likely security events before they happen.

Here are more specific ways IT and security teams could increase could be more effective and productive using GenAI:

• Phishing and malware analysis and prevention—GenAI can learn to detect phishing emails and websites and can generate simulated phishing attacks for security training purposes, helping employees recognize attempts and reducing the risk of breaches. Similarly, it can generate malware samples to test and develop new security measures.

• Incident response—After a security incident has occurred, GenAI can generate recommended actions or responses based on prior successful mitigation strategies.

• User behavior analysis—GenAI can learn normal user behavior on a network, then identify anomalies that may indicate a security threat–such as a user suddenly downloading large amounts of data.

Generative AI for everyone

From the C-suite to every level of the organization, GenAI has huge potential to help teams and individual employees maximize their potential.

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