AI Transformation: What It Means for 2023 & Beyond

‍What is AI transformation?

AI transformation is a process by which a company implements and uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve business operations and overall strategy. The term “AI transformation” isn’t limited to a specific industry but speaks to a larger movement of people realizing how powerful, helpful, and profitable this technology can be. 

In fact, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc, 80% of enterprise executives believe automation can be applied to any business decision.

Some of the key ways AI is currently being used by businesses include:

• Automation: AI technologies can automate routine tasks, freeing time for employees to work on higher-level projects.
• Content/copy generation: Content generators like Copy.ai can create any type of text-based asset you need for your business (try it for free!).
• Improved decision-making: AI can help companies analyze large amounts of data and make more informed decisions based on that data.
• Better customer experience: Support has been revolutionized by helping companies provide instant answers to inquiries and personalizing interactions/recommendations.
• Supply chain optimization: Businesses can leverage AI to optimize their supply chain by predicting demand, managing inventory, and optimizing delivery routes.
• Fraud detection: AI can help companies detect fraudulent activity more quickly and accurately than traditional methods (saving both time and money)
• Accounting: Companies are getting a better understanding of their cash visibility and are using AI to make smarter budgeting decisions with more accurate cash flow forecasts. 

Again, AI transformation is driving major changes in nearly every industry. Companies that adopt AI technologies can stay ahead of the competition and gain a competitive advantage. 

Considering artificial intelligence is the perfect complement to any automation strategy, it’s no wonder businesses are now relying heavily on AI tools to complete those projects. 

Why are companies investing big in AI?

Save time

One of the biggest benefits of using AI in your business is that it can save your team heaps of time. In fact, AI has already been reported to save businesses over 2,000 hours/year. 

How is this possible?

‍That part’s easy. 

AI allows you to automate processes that are traditionally done by humans, which means that you don't have to hire and train new employees as workloads grow. Instead, you can lean on AI to complete monotonous, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. 

Build more efficient funnels 

Businesses using AI can build more efficient sales and marketing funnels by creating a single, unified system that automates the entire process from beginning to end.

Let’s look at how this comes into play in the real world.

For marketing funnels 

For marketing funnels, AI can streamline tedious processes and automate your workflows. This frees your team to work on more complex tasks requiring human creativity. 

Some use cases include: 

• Generating blog posts from outline to first draft in minutes 
• Writing multiple versions of ad copy to test for optimization 
• Creating thought-provoking leaderships posts on social media 
• Translating text-based campaigns to reach a larger audience 

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When working with Chat by Copy.ai and our Workflows (currently in beta), you can achieve results at scale. 

Imagine taking a spreadsheet with 100 keywords and watching Copy.ai generate outlines, content briefs, and first drafts at the click of a button. Then, your team of expert writers can go in and polish the pieces to perfection. 

These are the kinds of AI initiatives marketing teams are leveraging as part of their digital transformation.

While you’ll still need that magic human touch, your writers can focus on building the best content possible rather than wasting time struggling with the blank page. 

When done correctly, automating AI workflows for marketing funnels can (and should) transform the way your team approaches content.

For more information, check out this helpful resource: How to Use AI for Marketing. 

For sales funnels

In your sales funnel, AI can help you in many ways. 

Some platforms identify which leads are most likely to be converted into paying customers. This means you can spend your time on people who are ready to buy and save yourself the frustration of trying to convince clients who aren't a good fit.

But many teams need help starting meaningful conversations with new leads. Sales development representatives (SDRs) may spend hours hunting down prospects and trying to write personalized emails, only to hear back from a handful of recipients.

Software like Copy.ai, though, provide AI solutions that can help. 

Copy.ai has an automated workflow specifically for cold sales funnels. With your recipient’s LinkedIn URL and some information about your products or services, our platform instantly generates a personalized cold email/InMail message. 

From there, you can kick things up by integrating Copy.ai with your CRM or sales automation platform. 

This means you could take a list of LinkedIn URLs from your target audience. Then get a list of personalized email copy for each of your recipients with a pitch for your product. 

When your sales funnels are powered by Copy.ai, you can generate these outreach messages – along with timely follow-ups – to break through your execution barriers. 

Try Copy.ai’s Workflows (currently in beta) today! 

Gain actionable insights 

AI algorithms can analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns/trends and inform data-driven decisions on future growth. It can also help businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customers by analyzing customer data to provide insights that inform product development and marketing efforts.

These insights ultimately lead to benefits like: 

• Improved decision-making: AI can make decisions based on large amounts of real-time data, which helps leadership move in the right direction.
• Better customer experience: Personalized messaging and recommendations can improve the customer journey and lead to stronger brand loyalty.
• Increased efficiency: AI automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Now, your team can work on the problems that really count.
• Accurate predictive analytics: Discover how your customer’s current behavior indicates future buying patterns with AI’s unique ability to sift through massive amounts of key data points (such as sales calls, online browsing history, social media interactions, and customer feedback surveys).
• Competitive advantage: Grow faster by being an early adopter of AI. As businesses drag their heels assessing risk, you can implement customer feedback and grow faster than ever. 

AI has become a reliable resource for businesses leveraging data to improve operations and provide a better customer experience. 

In the past, a team of data scientists was normally required to pull these kinds of insights. But with the accessibility of modern AI, project teams can leverage machine learning models without previous technical experience.

Improved customer journey 

Businesses can leverage AI to improve the customer experience in several ways. 

AI-powered chatbots can provide quick and efficient customer service, answer common questions, and direct customers to the right resources. 

Some tools, like SupportLogic, are even using AI to transform customer support from a reactive model to a proactive one. They use AI to predict when customers will likely have a problem so your support team can swoop in before they churn. 

AI can also analyze customer data to personalize recommendations and communication, enabling customers to solve problems faster.

We recommend using a CRM or sales automation platform and syncing it with Copy.ai. That way, you can get personalized insights from your CRM and generate personalized messaging for each of your contacts with Copy.ai. 

Want to try it in action? 

👉 Try Copy.ai (100% risk-free) today!

Scalable growth 

This is the bottom line for most companies: new technology helps businesses grow more efficiently. And with AI, this growth can be accomplished at a scale unlike you’ve ever experienced. 

AI can pull tons of data and analytics, use that data to predict behaviors, and create personalized customer experiences. Plus, it’s a technology that can help every department of your company, including: 

• Marketing 
• Sales
• Accounting
• Human resources 
• Legal (in some cases)
• Production 

Companies that take advantage and integrate AI to find new ways to make it work to their business’s benefit will give themselves a much-needed competitive edge and see better outcomes for their overall business strategies. 

How to transform your company into an AI-first organization

1. Determine your primary goals

Before you start your journey into AI transformation, you need to determine your goals. That way, you can measure AI's impact on your growth or decline.

Common goals for using AI in business include benchmarks like:

• Reducing the cost of operations
• Improving the efficiency of operations 
• Understanding customer behaviors 
• Saving time on repetitive tasks 

Once you establish what change is most important to you, you can decide what tools you should consider diving into for your AI needs.

Be sure to start small and expand rather than the other way around. While AI has never been more accessible in terms of cost and learning curve, you want to avoid overwhelming your entire workforce at once. 

Choose one main goal to focus on, implement AI workflows, and check the results. From there, you can add AI to other areas of your business. 

Finally, make sure your team’s goals stay clear and measurable. Here’s what that might look like using the SMART goal framework. 

SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable 
• Achievable 
• Relevant 
• Time-bound

Here’s an example of a weak vs. SMART goal: 

Weak goal: Reduce operational costs.

SMART goal: Cut monthly operational expenses by 10% within the next four months by implementing energy-efficient solutions, renegotiating supplier contracts, and streamlining internal processes to eliminate inefficiencies.

Yes, the SMART goal is much longer – because it checks all the boxes. 

This goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, providing a clear roadmap to your business value and help you minimize costs while maximizing your business's profitability.

2. Develop an AI strategy 

Now that you’ve created your goals, you can dive into the fun part: developing your AI strategy.

Your strategy should state your newly created goals, strengths, weaknesses, and action plan for the next three to six months. 

And (again), you’ll want to include how you’ll measure success. 

This is where you can lay out all the tools you believe your team should try, identify the people that you’d like to lead the initiative, and lay out the projects that you know AI could be integrated within. 

You should also be sure to set some ground rules while you’re creating this strategy. 

While AI is an exciting tool, it will still need the help of an actual person regarding inputs and quality control (in other words, the best recipe here is human creativity + AI talent).

This is the time when you want to map out the possible errors that can be made and the steps to make sure they can be avoided. 

3. Identify your starting point

Once you have a developed strategy, you can set the rest of your plans in motion.

Since AI is still relatively new to most non-technical consumers, we recommend beginning your journey by trying AI tools that are fairly approachable and easy to understand. 

For example, your team might have a goal to increase sales this quarter by 5-10%. An easy way of getting started would be using a tool like Copy.ai for producing personalized emails. 

Your SDRs/AEs can simply take a user’s public LinkedIn URL and add some information about your products/services. Then, like magic, Copy.ai generates a personalized message for that recipient. 

Plus, this software syncs with your CRM or sales automation platform, so you can nurture new leads with custom messages (all on autopilot) and send timely follow-ups. 

Finally, Copy.ai isn’t just used for sales messages. It can create any text-based assets your company needs for sales, marketing, human resources, etc. 

Starting with a product like this can help your team learn the ropes and see how approachable AI technology has become. And, more importantly, how efficient it can make each individual.

Want to see for yourself? Try Copy.ai for free (no credit card required) and see how a single AI tool can 100x your team's productivity.

4. ‍Provide internal AI training

One of the most important things you can do to ensure successful AI adoption is to offer internal training courses to your employees. This will help them become confident with the tools, create solutions, and understand how they can best use them. 

Sometimes, you might be able to rely on your AI tool provider to help with some of this legwork, as they’ll often train your team on how to get the most from their language learning model  and provide you with educational materials on how their product helps your use case.

Nonetheless, there’s still more work that will need to be done internally to assist with implementation.

This can include providing teams with suggested input ideas, integrating your AI tools into your current tech stack, encouraging your top performers to use and talk about the product internally, and celebrating and incentivizing small wins. 

5. ‍Create iterative processes 

This final task requires a bit of diligence but can be highly effective once implemented. 

As your team starts rolling out this AI strategy, you’ll need to assign a point person to evaluate each process and document what’s working/what isn’t. 

From there, you can create standard operating procedures and best practices that your team can use to continue to see success!

These procedures will help you scale operations and level up your AI needs as your processes become more sophisticated. 

‍The future of AI

It’s nearly impossible to predict the impact AI will have on businesses over the next few years—at least not with any accuracy. 

But one thing is clear: most companies see the potential of AI for scalable growth. 

In fact, according to Deloitte’s State of AI in Enterprise, “94% of business leaders surveyed agree that AI is critical to success over the next five years. Yet, as more organizations deploy AI, outcomes appear to be lagging.” 

That said, further advancements in AI might lessen the learning curve and help companies achieve better results. 

This year, we’ve already seen the the release of GTP-4, the next iteration of OpenAI’s powerful generative language model. And in a recent interview with ABC News, Sam Altman (CEO and founder of OpenAI) said that their team had finished GPT-4 several months ago and is working on more advanced models behind the scenes. 

Remember, these are just the developments taking place with OpenAI. 

Later this year, we’ll also see major enhancements to how we use Google and conversational search, and we’ll likely witness improvements in how AI tools can pull data and create reports.

This is one of the rare instances where the phrase “the potential is endless” isn’t hyperbole.

In the coming years, we’ll see more and more businesses transform their companies into ones that are AI-first. This will create a new economy and change how we do business as a society.

Note: Very recently, major leaders in the field of AI have signed an open petition to pause the development of AI until we can agree on how to use it most responsibly moving forward. For more information on that, check out this in-depth article. 

How to join the AI transformation

AI is the most exciting technology emerging, but it can be overwhelming to identify where to start. 

AI projects can be intimidating to people who are new to the tech and difficult to manage when your team isn't on the same page.

That's why the best place to get started is using Chat by Copy.ai. 

This lets you get started instantly, with no software downloads required. New users also get a free trial of our Pro plan and 2,000 words to use every month. 

And in 2023, Copy.ai will become even more critical to teams.

That's because most people know Chat by Copy.ai as one of the top AI-driven writing assistants on the market. But what many consumers don't know is that Copy.ai also uses AI technology to automate the tedious and routine aspects of your workflows.

Here are just a few examples of what you can do with this tech in your corner:

• Cold Email/LinkedIn Outreach: Create personalized cold emails at scale based on a user's public LinkedIn URL. Have the email copy generated in seconds to increase your lead generation efforts.
• Product Descriptions: Write SEO-friendly descriptions for each of your online products to drive more traffic to your online store (and increase conversions once that traffic is there).
• Programmatic SEO: Find related keywords for posts, create content outlines, and write entire sections of your articles. Throw everything on auto-pilot and at massive scale.
• Thought Leadership: Set your brand apart as a true leader in the field by generating in-depth long-form content in a fraction of the time it currently takes but without sacrificing an ounce of quality.

If you’re not up-to-date with the latest AI tools and strategies, then you’re already behind–and you need to hope your competitor isn’t pulling ahead. 

It's time to get to work and watch your AI investments start paying off. Start exploring AI transformation with our AI Sales and AI Marketing OS.