Beyond Sales and Marketing: AI's Hidden Potential in Your Workflow

When you hear "AI in business," your mind might jump to chatbots fielding customer queries or algorithms fine-tuning ad campaigns. But if that's where your imagination stops, you're missing out on AI's true potential. In reality, AI is reshaping how we work across every department and role, and not enough people are talking about how this is happening. So here's a start.

Redefining Productivity: AI as Strategic Partner (Co-pilot)

People often talk about co-pilots (many AIs even market it as such), but working with co-pilots is not a natural thing for most people, so here are a few examples.

Scenario 1: Structured Brainstorming and Idea Refinement

Picture this: You're tasked with developing a new product line. Instead of staring at a blank whiteboard, you sketch out some initial ideas on paper, snap a photo, and feed it to an AI. Within minutes, you've got a structured mind map with expanded concepts, potential challenges, and market considerations you hadn't even thought of.

This isn't just about prettying up your thoughts. It's about AI acting as a catalyst for your creativity, pushing your ideas further and helping you consider angles you might have missed. The result is a more comprehensive starting point that can save hours of back-and-forth in team meetings.

Scenario 2: Critical Analysis of Business Strategies

You've spent weeks crafting a new market entry strategy. It looks solid, but you want to ensure you haven't missed anything crucial. Enter AI as your impartial critic.

By feeding your strategy document to a chatbot, you can ask it to:

• Identify potential blind spots
• Suggest alternative approaches
• Highlight areas where your assumptions might be flawed

This isn't about AI replacing strategic thinking. It's about augmenting your expertise with data-driven insights and a fresh perspective. The outcome is a more robust strategy that's been pressure-tested before you even step into the boardroom.

Case study: When Netflix decided to expand into original content production, they used AI to analyze vast amounts of viewer data and industry trends. This AI-driven analysis helped shape their strategy, leading to the creation of hit shows like "House of Cards" and fundamentally changing their business model.

AI as Your Decision-Making Ally

Scenario 3: Multi-Perspective Analysis for Thorny Company Decisions

You're facing a major decision: should your company pivot to a subscription-based model? It's a choice that will impact every aspect of your business. Instead of relying solely on your executive team's opinions, you can leverage AI to simulate diverse viewpoints.

You could create multiple AI personas representing different stakeholders: a risk-averse CFO, an innovation-hungry CTO, a customer-centric CMO, and even hypothetical customers. Each "persona" analyzes the decision from its unique perspective, highlighting different risks and opportunities.

This approach doesn't make the decision for you. Instead, it ensures you've considered the issue from all angles, potentially uncovering crucial factors you might have overlooked. It's like having a diverse advisory board at your fingertips, available 24/7.

Scenario 4: Risk Assessment in Contracts and Negotiations

Legal departments are often bottlenecks in business operations. But what if AI could shoulder some of that burden? Imagine uploading a complex supplier contract to an AI system that's been trained on your company's past agreements and industry standards.

The AI could:

• Flag clauses that deviate from your standard terms
• Highlight potential risks based on past contract disputes
• Suggest alterations to better protect your interests

This doesn't replace your legal team. Instead, it allows them to focus their expertise on the most critical issues while ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. The result is faster contract reviews, reduced risk, and more balanced agreements.

Real-world application: JPMorgan Chase has implemented COIN (Contract Intelligence), an AI system that interprets commercial loan agreements. It accomplishes in seconds what used to take lawyers 360,000 hours each year, dramatically speeding up the loan approval process.

Unleashing Creativity and Innovation with AI

Scenario 5: Transforming Rough Ideas into Comprehensive Project Plans

You've got a brilliant idea for a new initiative, but translating that into a actionable project plan takes time With AI, you can turn that initial spark into a fully-fledged roadmap in minutes

Start by outlining your core idea to an AI assistant. It can then:

• Break down the project into logical phases
• Suggest potential team structures and key roles
• Identify critical dependencies and potential bottlenecks
• Estimate rough timelines based on similar projects
• Bonus tip: use Gamma to bring your roadmap to life in seconds by simply copy-pasting it in

This isn't about AI planning your project for you. It's about quickly generating a comprehensive first draft that you and your team can refine. You're not starting from scratch; you're iterating on a solid foundation.

Tool recommendation: While ChatGPT can help with initial brainstorming, tools like Gamma can take your rough outline and transform it into a nicely structured project plan.

Scenario 6: Generating and Evaluating Multiple Solutions

When faced with a complex problem, our human tendency is often to latch onto the first viable solution. AI can help us break out of this limited thinking by generating multiple diverse approaches to a single challenge.

Let's say you're trying to reduce your company's carbon footprint. You could describe the problem to an AI system, which then generates a range of potential solutions, from the conventional to the wildly innovative. For each solution, the AI could also provide:

• Pros and cons
• Potential implementation challenges
• Rough cost estimates
• Case studies of similar approaches in other industries

This approach doesn't replace human decision-making. Instead, it broadens our solution space and challenges our assumptions. You might find that the best approach is a combination of ideas you'd never have considered together.

Case study: When Airbus was designing its A350 aircraft, they used AI to generate and evaluate thousands of potential partition designs. The AI came up with a novel, bionic design that was stronger yet lighter than traditional options, leading to significant fuel savings.

Getting Started: Integrating AI into Your Workflow

The scenarios we've explored might sound futuristic, but the tools to implement them exist today. The key is to start small:

1. Identify a recurring task or challenge in your role that could benefit from AI assistance.

2. Experiment with a general-purpose AI tool to see how it might help.

3. Refine your approach based on the results.

4. Gradually expand your use of AI as you become more comfortable with its capabilities and limitations.

Remember, the goal isn't to replace human thinking but to augment it. AI is at its most powerful when it's freeing up your mental bandwidth for the type of creative, strategic thinking that machines can't replicate.

The Future is Already Here - Seize It

AI isn't just for tech companies or marketing departments. It's a tool that can transform how we approach problems, make decisions, and unleash our creativity across every role and industry. The examples we've explored are just the beginning. The real excitement lies in how you'll apply these capabilities to your unique challenges and opportunities.

So, here's your call to action: This week, choose one task you've been putting off or struggling with. It could be a strategy document that needs refining, a complex decision you've been wrestling with, or a creative project you can't seem to kickstart. Apply one of the AI techniques we've discussed to that task.

You might be surprised at how quickly you can break through barriers and gain new insights. Share your experience with your team. Become an AI champion in your organization. Because the companies that thrive in the coming years won't just be the ones with the best products or the biggest budgets - they'll be the ones that best harness the power of AI to amplify human intelligence and creativity.

The future of work isn't coming—it's already here. And it's waiting for you to seize it.