How AI smart assistants are transforming business as we know it

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming industries, sparking innovation and organizational change. Within the enterprise, GenAI is leading to better decision-making, business innovation, and process optimization. 

Supporting GenAI's growth is the rise of AI smart assistants, which enable modern enterprises to scale and automate tasks. For example, Forbes reports on how GenAI is revolutionizing the software engineering sector through coding assistants, real-time guidance as you code, and code style and standards enforcement. 

While AI smart assistants are making waves in software engineering, their transformative power extends far beyond. Whether an organization is looking to automate tasks in HR, streamline operations in legal, or enhance customer engagement in marketing, AI smart assistants offer solutions that can bring a competitive edge in any department of an organization, across all industries. 

What are AI smart assistants? 

An AI smart assistant is a software program that uses AI to perform various tasks. Notably, smart assistants have the following characteristics: 

• Natural language understanding: The ability to understand user requests and respond in natural language. 
• Effective response: Performs tasks or responds creatively by generating new content. 
• General knowledge base: Enabling the execution of a wide range of tasks. 
• Customizability: Can be adapted to increase specialization and effectiveness.

AI smart assistants have caught on because they bring the potential for scaling and automation to areas where software used to struggle. Their general-purpose skills and understanding of natural language give them the ability to seemingly intuit patterns and create content in a way that traditional software programs have fallen short.

However, AI assistants are not a replacement for skilled employees. As with a junior-level employee, reviewing the output of AI assistants and guiding them to focus on specific tasks requires an expert. AI assistants function best as a force multiplier for the productivity of your skilled team members.

The ability of AI smart assistants to do seemingly everything makes it difficult to answer the question, “What should they be used for?” Enterprises seeking to leverage AI assistants should begin by identifying use cases where these assistants can provide the most value. 

AI assistant use cases and benefits 

AI assistants can analyze large datasets, creatively generate content and plans, and communicate those plans in natural language. Thus, they have the skills and abilities to tackle many common tasks within your enterprise. 

Productivity enhancer and automation specialist 

Enterprises are always looking for productivity multipliers, and AI smart assistants fit this mold well. As general-purpose assistants, they can handle tasks in several categories. 

• Automation of routine tasks: With their general knowledge, they can be quickly applied to handle repetitive tasks, freeing up employees for work that requires more specialized knowledge. For example, in HR, AI assistants can quickly generate job descriptions and requirements for open positions or schedule candidate follow-up interviews. They can even optimize workflows and suggest ways to boost efficiency. 
• Summarization and data entry: AI meeting assistants can take minutes for your online meetings as well as generate summaries and action items. Automating this process saves time and allows participants to focus on the creative and more meaningful work occurring during the meeting. 
• Assistance with unfamiliar tasks: AI smart assistants can guide employees on how to get started with new or unfamiliar tasks. They can provide tutorials, highlight pitfalls, and walk through processes step by step, much like a virtual mentor. For example, in the software development domain, an AI coding assistant can generate code snippets and even help with troubleshooting. 

Operations streamlining 

AI smart assistants can identify inefficiencies in your operational processes, determining where optimization and automation can bring the deepest impact. For example, when applied to supply chain logistics, an AI smart assistant can predict future demand based on sales history, identify potential disruptions, and handle planning. 

AI smart assistants are also good at handling integrations between systems. Because of their generative abilities, they can be “taught” to take data from one system, transform it, and send it to another system quickly. From there, the assistant can continue to handle the integration automatically, saving time and smoothing out the data flow across systems. 

Decision-making and analysis 

GenAI technologies can also process large amounts of data quickly, which improves data analysis and subsequent decision-making.

Even with large datasets, AI smart assistants can efficiently analyze data to glean actionable insights on customer behavior, operational performance, or other valuable metrics. Smart assistants make data-driven decision-making quicker, allowing for faster implementation and more experimentation. For example, marketing-based AI assistants can use gathered customer behavior to predict future behavior, offer insights on how to segment and target marketing campaigns, and even automatically test variations in content.

With that data and those insights in hand, smart assistants can further aid the decision-making process through their brainstorming and modeling abilities. AI smart assistants can generate ideas, create models, and even simulate advanced scenarios. 

Customer service and engagement 

AI smart assistants also improve the customer service experience. With access to larger knowledge databases and more natural language than a traditional chatbot, an AI chatbot smart assistant can provide more succinct and accurate responses, leading to increased customer satisfaction.

Additionally, AI assistants can use their data analysis prowess to offer personalized recommendations and services to customers. This kind of highly targeted marketing is made possible through the ability of AI assistants to analyze data, generate personalized marketing at scale, and autonomously take actions to execute this marketing.

AI assistants also offer omnichannel integration. By using AI to personalize and optimize customer experiences across multiple channels, the customer experience becomes more consistent and reliable, regardless of the channel. 

Unlock the power of AI assistants 

AI smart assistants drive innovation, efficiency, and better decision-making in businesses. With broad general-purpose skills and the ability to process large amounts of data, AI smart assistants can make an impact in nearly every area of your business. 

For more reading on AI, check out four ways AI personalization can improve your customer experience strategy.