AI for Work: 10 Ways AI Can Supercharge Productivity

Generative artificial intelligence is increasingly being adopted across all facets of business, with some companies already reporting impressive successes.

According to a recent article published by the Harvard Business Review , most business functions 'can be augmented, automated, or reinvented with gen AI’. They also believe work processes in capital-market sectors — along with the banking, legal and insurance industries — are likely to experience the biggest transformations. Travel, retail, energy, and health won’t be far behind.

Whether you work in sales, marketing, customer service, software development, or other parts of your business’s operation, it is clear that AI, when used properly, can supercharge your productivity and help you make smarter decisions. Let’s explore some of the main ways it can do so and how you can benefit from it.

“If you make a sale, you make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.” This quote has been attributed to acclaimed American entrepreneur Jim Rohn.

Well, artificial intelligence can help you achieve this by dealing with customer service enquiries in a much faster, more efficient, and more personalised way.

Through Salesforce Agentforce, organisations can create an AI chatbot or virtual AI agent that can perform tasks independently across a range of business functions, including sales, service, marketing, and commerce. This empowers teams to focus on more complex issues.

In doing this, they can slash wait times, increase response times for their customers' enquiries, and enhance their satisfaction by providing them with tailored solutions based on their needs.

To boost their efficiency and productivity, many businesses are embracing AI automation as a way for their employees to work smarter and not necessarily harder. One of the most effective solutions currently being employed is the automation of certain processes that can markedly improve a company’s resource management function.

In Australia, Sustainable Salons use Salesforce to automate pricing updates, saving 282 days of effort, which has significantly improved their efficiency throughout the entire operation.

Data entry is another prime example of a labour-intensive activity that can be completed much more quickly by automating processes. Sutton Tools did this when they began using Salesforce over a decade ago. They have subsequently managed to reduce the time they spend on data entry by 50%.

In many roles, employees are required to analyse significant amounts of company data when making a strategic decision to benefit the business. This can take time and prevent them from focusing on other responsibilities.

However, Generative AI can speed up this process by automating tasks like data cleaning, feature engineering, and model building, which can otherwise be very time-consuming.

A prominent organisation in the high-performance automotive sector Formula 1 is one industry that has transformed its business through Salesforce by unifying its data to gain actionable insights and make decisions across every part of the organisation.

Thanks to Automotive Cloud, Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud being built into the platform, they can now put all of their data in the hands of their service, marketing, sales teams, and project managers, which empowers them to drive innovation and deliver more value to their customers.

Content creation is another area of business where AI has substantially improved workflows. According to statistics from the Content Marketing Institute , a whopping 87% of B2B marketers said that content marketing created brand awareness for their business in the last 12 months.

Good content that ranks well on search engines can drive leads, improve customer retention, and educate audiences on key issues. Many companies view content creation as an essential part of their digital marketing.

AI empowers digital workers to swiftly generate blog titles, structures, and content related to specific subjects that are relevant to a particular demographic or customer segment. This means that companies can quickly increase the number of pages on their website so that potential customers can more easily discover them in Google searches.

In addition to creating content, generative AI can save a substantial amount of time performing keyword research. Thanks to its ability to quickly analyse vast amounts of data, an AI tool for SEO can identify the most valuable primary long-tail keywords and associated LSI keywords for search engine optimisation based on user intent more quickly and effectively than through manual research methods.

It can also predict search trends and provide comprehensive insights into competitor strategies, which allows marketers to create more targeted content that better resonates with potential customers.

Companies that excel at personalisation generate around 40% more revenue from those activities than others in their marketplace, according to McKinsey & Company’s Next in Personalisation 2021 Report .

This helps explain why more companies are now using generative AI to create personalised marketing campaigns that deliver more targeted, individualised and relevant messages directly to their customers, improving their ROI in the process.

The Swedish fintech company Klarna, for example, claims it’s reduced the amount it spends on sales and marketing by a sum that equates to $10 million per year in annualised savings.

Through Salesforce Marketing AI, businesses can take what they already know about their audience, discover more about them, and then use that customer data to provide recommendations to develop more personalised experiences.

For example, a business might determine the best time to send a customer emails suggesting specific products to buy based on their previous browsing or purchasing habits.

Eighty-three per cent of sales teams using AI saw revenue growth in 2024, compared to 66% who didn’t use it. This result highlights that the sales function benefits significantly from artificial intelligence.

Using AI can help sales agents quickly understand what stage of the sales pipeline prospects are at. In addition, through our Sales AI solutions, they can also analyse data from previous sales calls, meeting notes, and customer information to determine the most appropriate course of action to take to confirm a sale.

Essentially, this enables sales agents to focus primarily on prospects who are most likely to improve their conversion rates and, therefore, the company’s overall bottom line.

For any business, managing its supply chain is both a key performance indicator and a critical success factor. This is why many businesses have decided to invest in AI to ensure they refine their process as much as they can.

By processing vast amounts of data and performing complicated tasks in real-time, AI can generate accurate predictive analysis that forecasts customer demand, helping companies eliminate the risk of popular products going out of stock. This enables them to improve their operational efficacy and maintain a more efficient inventory management system.

Additionally, for businesses that ship products to their customers, AI can look at traffic schedules and patterns to determine the best delivery routes and ensure they reach them as fast as possible. These AI capabilities are particularly advantageous for those who sell perishable goods like foods or need to make sure medicines or medical samples arrive quickly at their destination.

For industries such as manufacturing and aviation, AI features are helping to make equipment and workplaces safer than ever before.

Qantas uses AI technology to analyse flight data and engine performance to confirm that an aircraft is fit to fly. This enables their employees to make critical decisions about risk management more confidently. It also helps the company maintain a proud safety record and minimises flight cancellations.

Salesforce customers can integrate AI sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices to analyse complex data in real time. This allows them to mitigate risks, reduce downtime, and become alert to the possibility of a potentially dangerous issue arising, such as a machinery malfunction.

AI applications have been a fantastic productivity tool for human resources departments, enabling them to streamline the process of recruiting and onboarding. AI assistants can screen large numbers of resumes and analyse calendars to automate the scheduling of interviews.

Companies can also handle routine employee queries and quickly gain AI insights about employee satisfaction and training needs from surveys.

As AI becomes more widely integrated into work processes, it’s going to change how we work. Whether you’re employed in sales or customer service, own a small business or are a project manager in a multinational corporation, Salesforce Artificial Intelligence can help you and your team work with improved efficiency and greater productivity.

Watch this demo now to see how it can revolutionise your workflow.