How are you using AI to accelerate your business? Lots of folks are still asking this question, and I still hear responses ranging widely from “we love it” to “we think it's all hype”. It's very understandable because AI tech today is still in the early innings, so getting the most out of it requires some effort and ingenuity from your team. Getting the best results also requires some training and adoption of new ways of working.

Larger companies are able to break the problem down by having specialist teams build AI solutions for everyone else.

For smaller companies, I suggest a basic framework like:

1. Start with simple use cases
2. Build with off the shelf tools (custom build is super expensive)
3. Apply these use cases across a few teams
4. Find a champion within each team to learn first, then educate others
5. Once you get rolling, then look to expand to more complex tasks

In the image for this post I highlight these general use cases:

• "Drafting partner" for written comms
• Searching and synthesizing info across the company
• Answering questions based on internal knowledge and docs
• Self-serve analytics for managers
• Task automation

and how those get applied to specific teams:

Sales Team:

• Lead qualification - have AI do research on new prospects and evaluate their profile against your customer persona
• Team coaching - AI as a sales-person coach to help close deals

Customer Success:

• Knowledge partner - train the AI on internal knowledge bases, work tickets, and unstructured conversations to help CS members answer inquiries faster and more accurately.

Marketing:

• Competitor analysis - research competitors and benchmark against your company
• Content drafting partner - help draft marketing comms

Product & Eng:

• Product analytics - ad-hoc product usage analytics pulled directly from a database
• Eng metrics - Engineering org metrics pulled from Github and JIRA

People Team:

• HR answer Chatbot - self-service Answer bot for common HR questions
• Onboarding buddy - More effective onboarding buddy can answer a range of questions and help new employees get situated

Getting your team started with smaller wins will help them understand the technology and how best to utilize it for their work. That will lead to insights on how to take on harder tasks like process automations.

Starting out with Supercog

If your team is already using ChatGPT or Claude, then introducing Supercog is pretty straightforward: "This Slack agent has the same knowledge as ChatGPT, but is also connected to our internal systems, docs and data."

We are using team and project-specific answer bots every day, and I recommend those as a great place for people to start. (Setup is easy.)

I use Supercog for ad-hoc customer analytics, connected to our app database and our Email marketing system. I also have my personal agent check my calendar and if it sees that I am meeting someone new then it creates a quick "research report" on the person to help me prep for the meeting.