Benefits of AI: How Companies are Transforming Operations

From smartphone apps to workplace software, video streaming services and even vehicle safety features, many of us interact with an AI-powered solution at least once each day. 

AI applications have steadily been on the rise over the past decade. A survey by McKinsey found that in 2017, 20 percent of organizations were already using AI in at least one area of their business. 

So, what’s with all the hype about now if it’s old news? 

Well, AI isn’t a static piece of technology. It’s driven by algorithms and models that are constantly learning from the data that’s fed into it. Today, AI has an explosive amount of data to leverage for more accurate and human-centric decision-making.

This is why half of organizations were using AI in their daily business operations by 2020. 

With a wide range of accessible applications and resources, AI has redefined the way we work and communicate. But how well are you maximizing these opportunities? Keep reading for helpful best practices, examples, and a free tool you can start using right now. 

What are the benefits of AI? 

If you think AI is only worth a shot if you’re extremely tech-savvy or have a crazy budget to spare, think again. 

For instance, one popular example of game-changing AI maturity in the past year is GPT-3, a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

James Vincent, a reporter at The Verge, writes about how surprised he was when a friend used ChatGPT to write an Excel macro that saved him a few hours of work. He describes the friend as someone who isn’t tech-minded and has never formally learned to code. Being able to save a few hours of work from having a few days worth of access was a big deal. (Read More: Untold Advantages of using rephrasing tools.)

Sidd Hora, Sales Operations and Enablement Manager at Crosscard saw similar time savings from using Scribe to build process documentation. Before using Scribe, Sidd would have to manually create documents, annotate them and paste them into Confluence. 

“Before Scribe, one article would have taken me 10-to-15 minutes, or even more. Scribe has literally reduced the time to one or two minutes,” Sidd says. 

Compared to what it was just a few years ago, the ROI of AI has multiplied significantly. The benefits of AI include helping teams: 

• Enhance productivity: Productivity can be easily compromised by meetings, digital distractions, and poor processes. Weaving AI into everyday activities like creating documentation, writing emails, and searching for information will save time. And I don’t know about you, but I’ll never say no to an extra few hours in my day. By using AI to work smarter, you give yourself more bandwidth to focus on tasks that deliver the most impact to your business and communities.
• Reduce human errors: AI models are trained to process large volumes of data at high speed. Although AI is far from perfect, it does dramatically improve the quality of output compared to manual data cleaning and analysis. For example, tools like Akkio and Tableau help organizations sift through heaps of business data in a matter of minutes without any coding. Manually sorting through all this data with tight turnaround times can lead to more duplicate data, miscalculations, surface-level analysis and confirmation bias.
• Automate repetitive tasks: Many AI-powered solutions are built to replicate processes, learn from outcomes and repeat those processes again with a new and improved understanding. AI’s speed of processing information and recognizing patterns is what makes AI a perfect support tool for day-to-day operations. These capabilities can be applied to accelerate straightforward processes like data deduplication, audio transcriptions, detecting unwanted information and even creating process documentation. In fact, AI automatically generated this 10-step guide in 29 seconds: 

• Improve the user experience: Many companies use AI to give their website visitors and customers personalized recommendations for their apps and services. For example, personalized user experiences on retail websites can help us discover products that are the most relevant to our browsing patterns and geographic location. 

In a digital-first workplace, AI also helps companies deliver personalized employee onboarding programs as well as engaging and interactive training modules, documentation and customer support resources.

How is AI used in modern workplaces? 

In his blog, Bill Gates describes AI’s ability to change the way we work, communicate, and solve problems. “Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it,” he adds. 

For the everyday knowledge worker, it begs the question: How are these transformative changes taking shape in my day-to-day work? 

In 2022, businesses were leveraging close to four different AI capabilities. Top responses in a McKinsey survey include robotic process automation (RPA), computer vision, natural-language text understanding and conversational interfaces. 

I know…those were a lot of big words. So let’s break those capabilities down in terms of real-world examples of AI software applications: 

1. Customer support: Customer service teams can use AI across the entire customer lifecycle, whether it’s identifying unhappy customers, responding to high volumes of support tickets, or delivering curated content 24/7.
2. Marketing personalization: We see AI being used across all marketing functions today, from content marketing to demand generation and marketing operations. Companies can use AI to analyze different user segments, build targeted campaigns and operationalize content creation and distribution.
3. Business forecasting: Companies use AI algorithms to get more visibility into business trends and patterns associated with milestones, actions or specific timeframes. This is especially helpful for predicting customer churn, making more accurate sales forecasts, assessing market risks and optimizing resource expenditure.
4. Cybersecurity: Businesses use RPA to automate routine tasks in their security operations, like collecting and analyzing data on potential threats, streamlining incident response notifications, and accelerating compliance reporting. Acting on data with scale and speed is critical in ensuring cybersecurity. AI reduces the likeliness of human error and delays that can put entire systems at risk.
5. Process documentation: Intelligent algorithms can be trained to analyze visual information like screen recordings and parse them into clear and concise descriptions in a specific format. This technology lets organizations move away from manual document creation, which often includes hours spent gathering visuals, writing descriptive text from scratch and laying out the information in a user-friendly way. 

How Scribe automates knowledge creation & sharing

Let’s take a deeper look at how AI is used in modern workplaces to boost productivity. 

Employees can spend close to 140 hours in unnecessary meetings. Much of this time is lost to communication breakdowns due to poor training programs and inaccurate or lost documentation. 

Scribe automates document creation and simplifies how documents are shared and maintained. Creating clear and engaging tutorials can easily turn into a messy project. Imagine a blank document, a desktop full of screenshots and screen recordings, and a laundry list of distribution channels for the document. 

Here’s how Scribe streamlines document creation: 

1. Capture software workflows with the Scribe recorder.
2. Generate step-by-step guides automatically – complete with screenshots, instructions, and clicks.
3. Customize guides with a text editor, smart tips, step actions, and branding styles/ 
4. Save the guide in a cloud-based workspace that reflects all edits immediately

How do Scribe’s features help you?

In the example above, you’ll see that Scribe isn’t just a regular screen recording software. We have a suite of cool features that help you: 

1. Save time, effort and money: Scribe lets teams maximize their hours on work that drives KPIs. With Scribe’s auto-generated step-by-step guides, companies don’t have to think twice about scaling a hub of easy-to-understand documentation. In fact, you can create a complex guide with 20 steps in just 2 minutes using Scribe!
2. Share knowledge faster: Instead of searching through messy folders, threads and channels for information, you can whip up a Scribe and share it as a URL with your team members. Scribe also integrates with a whole range of tools, from project management platforms to training software and knowledge bases. Embed your Scribes directly into your tech stack to make tutorials visible across all workflows. 
3. Keep documents up-to-date: Say goodbye to outdated PDFs and manual document updates. Edits in Scribe are saved and automatically reflected in URLs and embeds. That means you don’t have to run through a laundry list of locations for document updates, and you don’t have to resend updates to team members who already have access to the tutorial.
4. Boost information retention and engagement: Scribe makes your documents clean, modern, and visually compelling. Each step comes with clear screenshots or screen recordings along with visible cursor tracking. You even have the option to add callouts — like tips and alerts — to add more context to steps in your workflow. If you have multiple Scribes related to a particular process, project, or role, you can combine them into complete end-to-end guides with Scribe Pages. With Scribe Pages, you can customize documents with more text, hyperlinks and embed content from Loom and YouTube. Here’s an example:

Start using AI today to save time and work smarter 

Knowledge workers today spend 33 percent of their time on skilled work and 9 percent on strategy. In contrast, over half an average work day is spent on work about work — we’re talking about all those administrative, repetitive tasks that AI should be accelerating. 

Sign up for Scribe's free Basic Plan or Pro Plans to adopt intelligent automation in your process documentation, employee training and asynchronous communication!