How is AI Used in Business? 5 Real-World Examples & Tools

ChatGPT’s viral success really showed how (pleasantly) unexpected AI’s maturity is. Many businesses didn’t realize how far AI had come until generative AI made waves in the media. But how AI is used in business extends far beyond generative AI tools like ChatGPT. AI tools can help you personalize customer experiences, automate repetitive tasks, conduct market research, and more. 

And the best part is how democratized AI tools have become. Artificial intelligence is no longer a privilege exclusive to large enterprises. It’s accessible to businesses of any size.

If you’re interested in using AI to its full potential to transform the way you do business, we’ve got you covered.

What is AI used for in business?

There's a broad range of AI technologies used in business. Some ways that these technologies can help you out include: 

• Text analysis. Use AI software to analyze data and detect sentiments, topic clusters, recurring themes, etc.

• Content generation. Modern AI tools let you generate text, images, and even videos. Generative AI has dozens of use cases, from helping you craft emails to writing job descriptions and summarizing long documents.

• Analysis and forecasting. AI has really powerful applications related to data—it can help you collect, process, and analyze data at scale. It can also help you gain actionable insights from the data you’ve collected, and make accurate forecasts and predictions from it.

• Automation. AI can emulate human activity, freeing your employees from mundane, repetitive tasks and allowing them to prioritize work that really matters.

These are just a few ways that AI is used in business. Let's take a closer look at the use of AI with some real-world examples. 

How AI is used in business: 5 real-world examples

Looking to scale your business and improve customer experiences? Here are some ways that real brands have managed this with the help of AI. 

1. Intelligent automation 

Intelligent automation combines two different types of technologies, which are:

• Robotic process automation. This type of technology lets you automate repetitive, rule-based tasks with software robots. RPA tools are really popular for automating mundane tasks like data entry or processing invoices.
• Artificial intelligence. In the context of intelligent automation, this may include computer vision (tech that helps computers "read" images and videos), machine learning, optical character recognition (OCR), and similar technologies that help RPA bots function more effectively.

Intelligent automation has lots of use cases for different business functions and industries. The most popular intelligent automation provider, UiPath, is used by healthcare, telecommunications, and logistics companies, government organizations, and more. It's a mature platform that's perfect for medium-to-large enterprises, and small businesses find UiPath's free Community Edition quite helpful. 

In addition to computer vision and OCR, UiPath's RPA bots also have cognitive enhancements that let them extract unstructured data and perform sentiment analysis. Here's what UiPath's customers have to say about the intelligent automation provider:

2. Conversational AI

While ChatGPT is the latest AI technology to bring conversational AI into the spotlight, the technology has existed in different forms for many years—as a tool for powering chatbots. Not those annoying, rules-based chatbots that force you to click predefined buttons, but chatbots that use natural language processing to understand your questions and try to give you relevant answers (exactly like ChatGPT does).

The potential of conversational AI chatbots is quite exciting. Drift, which describes its platform as a "conversational cloud," leverages conversational AI-powered chatbots to help businesses engage, qualify, and convert prospects automatically on their website. Lots of businesses are leveraging Drift's platform to deliver more personalized experiences and to support their sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

Here are some ways that Drift has helped customers deliver more personalized experiences:

• Qualtrics. Qualtrics is a leading experience management software provider that wanted to improve its website experience. With Drift's help, Qualtrics was able to meet its customers where they are in their buyers’ journey and provide recommendations most relevant to their needs. Drift has helped Qualtrics increase its conversion to opportunity rate by 38X.‍
• 1Password. A data protection brand with over 100,000 loyal customers, 1Password leveraged Drift to transform its customer support experience. Drift’s conversational AI chatbots are available 24/7 to help customers with common problems, which reduces the workload of 1Password’s support team. Since using Drift, 1Password’s team has achieved greater efficiency and quicker resolutions. AI has deflected 75% of the brand’s support inquiries and helped the company increase its ROI in pipeline revenue by over 4X. You can read the full case study here.

3. Everyday task automation

No matter how much you like—or even love—your job, there are always mundane, everyday tasks that get boring very quickly. Like entering customer data into different software, updating your CRM, replying to emails, sending follow-up messages, and so on.

When tasks are this boring, why not let the robots have them? 👀 And that’s what Magical’s users realized.

Magical is an AI-powered task automation app that takes the boring out of your workday. And the best part? It’s completely free to use—just add it to Chrome with one click. With Magical, you won’t have to spend time thinking over how to reply to an email, copy-pasting information across your open tabs, or writing outreach messages for LinkedIn. Magical has three key features that transform the way you work:

• Customizable text expansion. Magical lets you create and save text shortcuts, which can be short phrases or templates for a whole email. You can include tags like {First Name} and {Date} (and you can create your own tags) to customize your messages. Use Magical’s text expansion to win your time back by automating repetitive typing.
  
• Transfers. Tired of copy-pasting data across your open tabs? Magical lets you teleport it instead. Just open your source tabs (like prospects’ LinkedIn profiles, review sites, or listings) and a destination tab (like your CRM, ATS, a Google Sheet, etc.) and use Transfers to aggregate important data in seconds.
  
• AI Assist. Powered by OpenAI’s (the provider of ChatGPT) API, Magical’s AI Assist gives you all of ChatGPT’s powers wherever you’re working. Use this powerful ChatGPT alternative to craft responses to your emails, write messages for outreach, create templates (which you can save as text shortcuts), summarize resumes, and more. You can access AI Assist anytime—in any tab—thanks to the Magical Chrome extension.

How Magical changed lives at DHL

DHL is one of the largest shipping and transformation companies in the world, so having to deal with lots of customer service requests comes with the territory. Each DHL employee handles approximately 50 to 100 conversations a day (yes, that’s a lot). Yanavuth Suos, Customer Claims Department Team Leader, described the toll that working at this scale can take:

Having to type out the same things every day can be tough. We have employees of all ages here. So getting them to sit in front of a computer screen and type out the same messages every day all day can cause tiredness, and increase mistakes.

Fortunately, Yanavuth discovered Magical, which DHL’s support team now uses everyday to make their lives easier. With Magical, DHL’s customer service agents:

• Don’t have to keep copy-pasting the same message templates over and over again. They can use Magical’s text shortcuts wherever they’re working to quickly type up a templated response. 
• Can share answers to common questions with fellow team members, thanks to their own shared workspace on Magical. 
• Can easily transfer data from DHL’s internal customer service tools. This allows them to look up estimated parcel delivery dates easily and share the information with customers instantly.

Samia Soumeur, Digital Customer Care Department Advisor and one of the top-performing employees in DHL’s support team, now uses Magical as part of her everyday workflow. Here’s what she has to say:

I’ve saved 195 hours of time using Magical so far, about four hours per day. I use it to answer more chats with customers and respond more quickly on social media. It’s a way for us to win back so much time.

And now, thanks to Magical’s AI assist, teams like DHL’s support team can save even more time. So if, like DHL, you want to start saving your coworkers one day every week with Magical’s task automation capabilities, add it to Chrome today. It’s free.

4. Customer journey personalization

According to an Adobe survey, 89% of marketers report increasing ROI by personalizing their campaigns. Personalization involves tailoring your customer's journey to improve their experience, like when you send them personalized product recommendations, suggest cross-sells, and remove friction from their decision-making process.

If you're a B2B business, most of your customer data probably lives on your CRM. But is that data up to date, and are you harnessing it to your full potential? If you can't confidently say "yes", then well, that's what tools like Optimove are for.

Optimove is an AI-powered personalization tool that helps you map and orchestrate customer journeys and provide them with tailored experiences. It helps you identify opportunities to engage customers, improve your campaigns with self-optimization algorithms, and radically transform your customer segmentation and automation efforts.

Here’s more on how some leading brands have leveraged Optimove to deliver superior customer experiences:

• Musti Group, a Nordic pet care specialist, uses Optimove to deliver personalized cross-sell campaigns to its customers. Optimove’s automatic recommendations help Musti increase sales at scale with minimal effort. With Optimove, Musti Group has increased its total order amount by 117% year-on-year, and average order value by 25% YoY. Read the full success story here.
  
• Paper Source, a premium paper and gift store, leveraged Optimove to make testing and experimentation a key part of its CRM strategy. Optimove has helped Paper Source execute campaigns across multiple channels and increase its customer conversion rate by 80%.

5. Consumer intelligence

How well do you know your customers? Do you have a robust understanding of how they feel about your brand? Do you know their sentiments toward your products, and your competitors' products? Do you know what industry trends your customers are a part of?

Consumer intelligence platforms, like Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence, aim to help you answer these questions—and more—with the power of AI. Brandwatch aggregates data from over 100 million social and online sources, and the company's AI system enriches the data to deliver actionable insights into consumer sentiments. Brandwatch has tracked more than 1.7 billion conversations since 2010, and it lets you customize your search results and the way your data is visualized.

Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence is used by leaving global brands like Unilever, Nestle, and Monster. Here's more on how global companies have seen success with the platform:

• Skyscanner, an app that helps customers simplify their travel planning and book travel options, uses Brandwatch to capture consumer insights. These insights help Skyscanner refine its go-to-market strategies, including messaging and how Skyscanner engages with customers. Brandwatch’s insights help Skyscanner’s teams quickly collect feedback about new features, understand customer sentiments, and personalize its messaging to its audience. You can read the full story here.
  
• Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverages company, relies on Brandwatch to monitor emerging trends, monitor brand health and anticipate problems, and stay up-to-date with relevant news and sources. Find out more in this case study.

How does AI fit into your business?

AI has evolved substantially, and it can help your business in lots of ways. It can help your employees save time, provide insights into how your customers feel, and give you the tools you need to personalize and transform your customers’ experiences.

So if you’re looking to leverage AI to scale your business, don’t treat generative AI as an endgame. In addition to using tools like Magical’s AI assist and ChatGPT, you can add other promising AI tools to your tech stack. Good luck!