EPISODE 2: What are Your AI Automation Options?

Everything You Need to Know About AI Automation to Get Started- Episode 2/8

What is AI Automation?

Automation is when technology acts without human intervention. In the context of workflow, it's when an event occurs that triggers technology to perform a series of actions. When something happens in one of the apps you use it updates another app, for example.

AI automation is quite simply taking advantage of the powerful abilities of AI within that sequence of actions.

What's Changed? Why Now?

The Explosion of AI

There are a whole bunch of cliches I could use here - to ask where you have been if you haven't noticed the changes happening in AI... It's pretty hard not to know that it has become more accessible for all of us.

The Explosion of No/Low- Code

What many of us may be less aware of, is the explosion of automation tools. Platforms that are developing fast in the low code/ no code space make it possible for anyone (if they are willing to learn the tool) to create an automation.

You no longer need to hire a developer. The skills you need can suddenly be more readily accessed in a single human, namely process optimisation and business savvy.

What Can Automation Do?

If you have never had workflow automation in your business, it is hard to envisage all the ways it could make your life easier.

Essentially though, anything that happens on your computer can be automated. Any task that is solely handled by the computer.

What Can AI Do?

When we combine the power of automation with AI almost anything is possible... AI has many skills that it is brilliant at, when I am building automations there are 6 core capabilities that I use most often.

Extracting Data

AI can take an image or a PDF or a long block of text and extract the data points that you want so they can be used for further processing.

Making Decisions

Given the parameters, AI can decide which course of action to take to move the task towards the goal.

Categorising

AI is brilliant at putting things into buckets, based on the definition of each category you provide. Use cases for this would be allocating IT Tickets or sorting your inbox.

Summarising

AI can take a long bit of text and summarise it for you, it can even pull out key actions or next steps.

Transforming

It can transform data from one form to another, perhaps if different apps in your sequence require it. It could also transform styles of pictures or the tone of text.

Analysing

It can analyse data, tell you how your business is performing or what move to consider next. And it can also analyse text or images and tell you about them.

How Could You Use AI Automation in Your Business?

This is the fun bit, opening the can of worms that is all the ideas that could be implemented in your business. To get your juices flowing here is a list for you:

Sales and Marketing

• find ideas
• summarise the news
• repurpose content you already have
• post content from one platform to another
• collate your stats
• analyse your stats
• make recommendations based on your stats
• create prospect lists
• enrich prospect lists
• do research before the call
• alert you to news from your prospect pool
• create icebreakers to reach out to people from
• alert you of buying signals like hiring new people or some other event in the news

Client on-boarding

• proposal writing
• contracts
• invoicing
• updating the CRM
• creating folders
• creating contracts
• tracking contracts

Project delivery

• schedule meetings
• keep you abreast of client requirements
• write up meeting notes
• add notes to the CRM
• track usage of your product or service
• answer client emails
• answer FAQs

Finance

• create invoices
• track expenses
• bookkeeping
• analyse your performance

HR

• keep your staff abreast of what is going on at your company
• onboard new employees
• create a chat bot of your company information or policies that employees could talk to
• keep track of holidays and push people to book them on time

Personal Admin

• schedule meetings for you
• send emails for you
• summarise anything unread in your inbox
• optimise your schedule…… ?

The list is absolutely huge! ?

Next Time...

...we will be looking at how you know you're ready for AI automation.

If you just can't wait for the rest of this series,there is a free PDF download that outlines many of the areas we will cover in this series. Head over to https://timewisely.co.uk/from-curious-to-confident to grab it.