Unlocking new competitive advantages with AI
AI is evolving so fast and it’s important we learn from each other to help develop the skills businesses will need to compete in future. We work with businesses of all sizes across Australia and are having some really diverse conversations about AI.
We’re seeing many small businesses using AI in interesting ways. Below we share some examples of AI in the workplace and offer useful advice to help you consider the use of AI in your own business.
AI adoption in Australia
Australians are increasingly using AI at work and are feeling optimistic about the potential to improve lives and boost the economy. The majority (72%) of people responding to a recent IPSOS survey on AI usage in Australia said they’d used an AI application in the last year to assist with their work.
Amongst small and medium businesses (SMBs), research we conducted for our Tech State of Play report on AI (PDF, 534KB) revealed that almost half of SMBs are open to, looking at or already using AI in their business.
Common AI applications in business
People are using AI to help create efficiencies across a range of key business areas. Some of the common use cases include:
- Assisting with communications or writing
- Helping to analyse complex information
- Supporting brainstorming, idea generation or creativity
- Learning about a new topic
- Summarising or simplifying long documents
- Helping with problem solving
5 ways AI can help improve business productivity
With its ability to help automate a range of business processes, AI has great potential to work alongside people, support them and free them up for tasks that require more strategic, critical or creative human thought. AI-enabled tools can help businesses and workers with both internal business operations and external customer facing activities. Below we explore some of these areas in more detail.
1. Innovation and idea development
Got an idea for a project to improve your business, or a completely new business idea? Discussing it with someone to gain a different perspective and help you weigh up pros, cons and potential benefits can really help. But sometimes the right person isn’t readily available.
With the right prompting, AI-enabled tools can help you assess and explore ideas you’ve come up with. They can help you consider the likelihood of different outcomes, generate ideas to enhance your idea or even alternative options to consider.
2. Briefing and tender processes
You may work with clients who need you to respond to briefs quickly. AI transcription solutions offer you the opportunity of generating an initial brief from a conversation so you can get started on putting together a proposal to move the process along quickly.
For more complex tenders, you might be required to submit proposals in response to long or complicated tender documents. AI solutions can help you extract key points from the documents and conduct an initial assessment on how well your proposal addresses key requirements before you finalise it for submission.
3. Relationship building
Being present to actively listen to your customers, clients or colleagues when meeting with them can help foster better relationships and enable more effective collaborations. Taking notes to log actions or important information for future reference is also important and is now something you can get AI to help with so the people in the room (physically or virtually) can have your undivided attention.
You can also get AI tools to help refresh your memory by summarising previous emails or meeting notes with someone before you’re due to meet them again.
4. More efficient communication
Customer service chatbots and AI can help your business boost efficiency and service your customers better. Using these types of AI solutions to support your teams by responding to common customer queries can help free up your people for more strategic conversations with your customers.
Read our article on how customer service chatbots and AI can help your business. With a clear plan in place, you can implement new efficient customer service models to help customers looking for support or even generate new leads for your business.
5. Access new learning opportunities
A lifelong learning mindset is key to helping many business owners on their journey. The opportunities and challenges before you can change at any time and when you’re your own boss it’s up to you to set the direction.
With digital innovation impacting many areas of business at unprecedented rates, it’s never been more important to be able to learn new things more quickly and throughout our working life. AI-enabled tools can help you quickly explore new topics and find further ways to extend the learning journey for yourself or your team.
Read our article on how to upskill your team on a budget for more ideas on how to encourage ongoing learning within your business. Many organisations also offer AI courses for businesses you might benefit from if you’re looking to start using AI in the workplace.
Business process automation versus augmentation
When thinking about what types of AI use cases are most relevant to your business, you can break down areas of your operations into what processes can be automated vs augmented and where strategic, critical, or creative human thought is most needed.
In some areas AI might help you automate parts of your workflows so that manual, repetitive tasks don’t take up so much of your people’s time, freeing them up to focus on things that can add more value to your business.
Other business tasks could be augmented by AI with new tools helping your people work in new ways that create more efficiency or an enhanced experience for your customers or team.
Responsible adoption of AI in the workplace
Think about how to implement AI in your business in a way that can deliver better outcomes for your people, your customers and society overall.
With increased adoption of AI tools comes increased concern about cyber security and privacy. As you develop your approach to AI it’s a good idea to review what you’re doing to help protect your data and business operations.
For more advice read our article on developing an AI strategy for your business.
