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From weed control in agriculture to AI versions of songs in music to creating mammogram reports in medicine, professionals across industries are finding new uses for AI. When discussing the impact of AI in the workplace, people often use buzzwords like “transformative” and “revolutionary.” In one survey on generative AI, 80% of CDOs and data leaders agreed that AI will eventually transform their organizations' business environment.
Unfortunately, this makes AI seem less accessible than it actually is. Like the Internet, AI will continue to change the way we work. But that shouldn't stop organizations, from small startups to major tech companies, from experimenting and finding ways to incorporate AI into current workflows as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, human work.
AI can make a good team even more amazing. At my company, Jotform, we're always looking for new ways to use our AI tools. Here are some ways AI can help our best employees do their jobs even better:
1. Reduce employee chores
It's important to love your job. Data from the ADP Research Institute shows that people who feel love, strength, joy, and excitement in their daily work are significantly more likely to be productive and stay with their companies longer.
Liking what you do can also help you perform better: Writing in the Harvard Business Review, author Marcus Buckingham explains that engaging in an activity you love produces a cocktail of chemicals in your brain that broaden your perspective, make you more open to other people's ideas, improve your cognitive abilities, and more.
Leaders should prioritize empowering their teams to do the work they love, but that doesn't mean whistling off at work every day. It's important to plan your workday in a way that spends as much time as possible on the most meaningful work — the parts of your job that you find rewarding — and minimizes other chores. This is where AI becomes your secret weapon.
At Jotform, we encourage our employees to constantly look for new ways to leverage the latest AI tools to automate mundane tasks and allow them to focus on the more rewarding aspects of their work. For example, during our weekly all-hands meetings, our meeting leaders always use an AI-based speech recognition app to record audio, convert it to text, and save it as a Google Doc.
Google
Encourage your employees to delegate chores to AI to increase their daily satisfaction.
2. Improved customer experience
Employees and customers are the most important stakeholders for business owners, and AI tools can improve the experience for both. First, AI gives customer service teams another tool to enhance customer support. For example, tools like IBM watsonx can respond to customer requests and learn from conversations to improve problem-solving capabilities.
But if you want to ensure customer satisfaction and continually grow your user base, it's important to listen deeply and not just to what your customers are saying. AI tools like Pendo can help you analyze user behavior and understand how your customers interact with your products and services, so you can predict what they want before they know it themselves.
For example, our UX team conducted customer interviews and discovered that users were creating forms for surveys, event registrations, online payments, and email signups. We could have stopped there, but after analyzing their behavior with AI tools, we discovered that users were not just collecting data, but acting on it. This insight shaped the subsequent products we developed for our users.
AI tools can help you listen to your customers, both through their words and actions, to gain a thorough understanding of how they interact with your company and how you can serve them better.
3. Enhanced decision-making
In law school, professors often use a technique called Socratic questioning, which involves asking a series of questions, each time shifting perspective or emphasizing a different consideration, to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of a problem or scenario.
Tools like ChatGPT can act as an AI law professor for organizational leaders and managers, brainstorming potential issues and alternative perspectives to help them make stronger decisions — not making decisions for them, but helping them identify blind spots and biases.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to come up with some questions that would help them decide whether to expand their business to a new region. Within seconds, dozens of questions popped up one after the other, such as:
- Are there any cultural or regulatory factors that may impact market entry or operations?
- How does the competitive landscape differ from your current market, and what strategies can you employ to differentiate yourself?
- Are there any logistical challenges or bottlenecks that could impact supply chain efficiency and distribution?
The goal isn't to outsource decision-making, but to equip team members with the insight to do what only humans can do: educated reasoning and making better decisions based on data, context, and intuition.
