What are the practical business applications of Ai? What are the best use cases and how can we tap into Ai tools to be most effective in our day-to-day work in a way that will give us a competitive edge? These are questions that the stock market has been asking lately, so much so that the market recently tanked, causing a correction in tech stocks. I’ve also spoken to a lot of my peers who are understandably confused about how Ai can give them an edge in their jobs, when so many of their colleagues are also using the very same Ai tools as well. To answer the question, Microsoft recently put out their report, Generative Ai in Real-World Workplaces, a controlled study of 6,000 employees in real-world situations.

The report found perceived benefits of Ai in customer facing roles (Customer Service, Sales) and content creation (Marketing, Creative) but more modest gains in specialty fields such as legal and engineering due to the complexity of the tasks at hand. The study found that power users who experiment with Ai in non-company sanctioned ways, and who use Copilot consistently for over 10 weeks, report more learning focus, better work-life balance and more interesting and fulfilling work. However, there are very important concerns when using Ai, for example, as Kate Crawford recently reported on in her article in Nature, Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret. It’s important to pause, plan carefully, and align to our customer’s needs before we dive right in to using Ai tools.

So what are some ways you can realize a positive impact on your work using Ai, and what are the best tools to help you do so? Start with your core brand strategy, and from there, develop use cases for Ai grounded in rich your customer’s current behaviors and needs. Then interrogate your data, prep the data, clean it up, and choose an algorithm to train your Ai model. From there, assess the accuracy of the predictions. You can train the model on a subset of data for greater efficiency, and decide on the attributes you want to compare. This process needs to be grounded by the core brand strategy and problems you are trying to solve for your customer. For example, in order to improve your website’s performance based on your strategic goals, Ai can help you place your website users into different behavior categories and then suggest content and the best touchpoints (i.e. email, SMS, phone calls) to reach them and move them through your marketing funnel.

What are the best tools to tap into, beyond the ones you’re already using like ChatGPT, Midjourney and MS Copilot? Consider no-code tools such as Dataiku that allow you to utilize a drag and drop model without knowing a line of code like Python. Dataiku offers an easy to use interface for data analytics and machine learning, and it’s a collaborative platform unlike some of the other no code tools. It will allow you to create machine learning models and generate predictions without writing a single line of code.

For entrepreneurs, agency leaders on pitches, and startup founders, another wonderful tool to check out is Narratize. Used by leaders at NASA, Boeing, and Hersheys, Narratize features templates that help you get started with a variety of thought leadership presentations, articles, and whitepapers. At the recent Future Frequencies Salon conference I attended, Kara Uchtman, CPO of Narratize said, “We approach story as a science…improving morale, customer sales and leads…by saving innovators 12 hours a week in time spent innovation storytelling.” Their platform is based on research with innovators to see how effective their selling is, and how they can realize increased customer sales and leads with Ai. They offer a free one week trial, so you can experiment with it right away.

How have you been experimenting with Ai lately? Drop me a note via email and let me know what you’ve been up to, and I’ll feature your learnings in a future post! Go forth, centered in your customers, and give these Ai tools a try!