How to use AI to gain a competitive edge in business

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology as a mainstream tool has been met with caution across industries ranging from web and graphic design to communications, but used correctly, it could take your business to the next level. It’s all about how you use it.

While AI is a useful tool, it isn’t quite the industry-ender creative agencies feared it might be. On the contrary, it could play a very useful part in slashing time spent on research, which can then be used to craft useful content.

We’ve put together a quick guide on how you can use AI to give your business an edge over your competitors.

Producing Content with AI

Are you struggling with ideas for fresh content? Do you know the direction you want to go in, but have no idea where to start your research? Here’s where AI can help.

AI is the perfect tool for the basic legwork, but when it comes to producing high quality, written content is it really the best solution?. Relying on AI exclusively to produce an engaging blog, press release, or social media post could be a mistake. But by using the correct prompts, you could give yourself a head-start in the quest for content that will engage your audience.

The Compose feature on Bing’s OpenAI plug-in is a handy tool, as it draws information from across the internet to provide up-to-date facts and stats. This is an improvement on OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, which is limited to the data that it has been fed, which has a cut off of 2021.

The trouble is, AI is not creating new knowledge; it’s just mining what’s already out there, and that can be dangerous.

While AI offers communicators a great new time saving tool, human intervention – let’s call it quality control – is still essential. Our industry is not about throwing words at a page. It’s about refined messaging, which is why we spend time carefully crafting key messages for target audiences. We use knowledge and understanding, and we take the time to generate creative and original ideas with impact, not a rehash of what’s gone before.

It’s the difference between taking a dump truck to excavate an archaeological site, and the time taken to carefully discover an artefact by hand. On the one hand you’ll shift a lot of soil and lot of artefacts, but you could miss what you’re looking for, and you could even damage it. You’ll get the job done at pace – yes – but it’s all rather hit and miss.

Put plainly, AI lacks finesse, and those gems of human nature – innovation, creativity, and independent thought.

For AI to succeed, it first needs a human with the ability to discern, to brief it on what it’s looking for; to instruct it where to mine and what to look for. Even with the right instructions the outcome could be vast amounts of data, which still needs to be sifted, selected, checked, and finally polished.

To make the most of AI in communications you need a blend of AI grunt and human craft; the x-factor that no machine can deliver; providing empathy, relatability, and an understanding of the psychology of your audience. This is, and always will be, vital if your target audience is going to connect with your brand – it’s where the professional PR practitioner will always prove invaluable. Of course, AI is not just about comms. AI has many other applications and benefits too, and here are just a few.

Customer Liaison

Does your business handle a lot of customer queries? We know it can be difficult to keep on top of them all whilst juggling other day-to-day tasks. By integrating AI into your website or social media channels, you can automate the entire process, delegating a chat bot to handle frequently asked questions, offer troubleshooting tips, and even providing personalised recommendations based on customer preferences! For example, Absolute PR and Marketing’s website uses HubSpot’s chat bot which can help answer any simple questions that our website visitors may have and filters through enquiries directly to the team’s inbox.

For sales teams, AI can be utilised in a similar way for lead generation; speaking to customers and identifying their unique needs, before passing this information on to a sales representative to follow up. This takes out much of the groundwork behind identifying potential customers and understanding their requirements, allowing for more time to be spent closing deals.

Conducting Market Research

AI can also be used to pull information from online sources, helping businesses to understand the current trends in their industries. There’s plenty of surveys, reviews, and data out there that could be useful in building your understanding of industry trends, but finding and collating it into a form that’s digestible can take some time. That’s where a tool such as Semrush’s Market Explorer can come in handy.

In an increasingly data-driven world, AI can act as the tool to enable businesses of all sizes to stay a step ahead of market trends and their competition. The ability of AI tools like Market Explorer to process massive amounts of data at the press of a button, including customer feedback, competitor and market traffic, surveys, and market trends, can be a huge time-saver for fast-paced businesses and a great way to identify growth opportunities. However, the findings still need to be curated and communicated with care to avoid untruths seeping into the mainstream.

We hope our latest blog has given you inspiration for how your business can make the most of AI. To ensure your content stands-out from the crowd and goes beyond what AI can currently offer, contact Absolute PR and Marketing by emailing info@absoluteprandmarketing.com or call 01392 680740.