Let the tech lend a hand: 7 ways businesses use AI to save time

We’ve all been there: Your team is so overwhelmed with repetitive, manual tasks like data entry and analysis that they’re not getting to the important stuff. Finding ways to make them more effective already feels like a full-time job, and hiring an assistant isn't in your budget. 

What if there’s a different way? 

Meet your new digital ally: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI can save you time and help you be more productive. While AI can solve a lot of problems, knowing how to effectively implement it in day-to-day work is a little more challenging. That’s why, before signing up for a tool, it helps to know how other businesses use artificial intelligence.

When teams know how to use AI to speed up or automate mundane tasks, they can focus on other important elements of their work. For example, relationship building, innovating, and collaborating to move projects forward.

In this article, you'll learn how AI can speed up business processes and make your teams more productive. You'll learn which AI tools support collaboration and efficiency, and how to use AI for different use cases. You will also see how Switchboard improves collaboration by letting you organize all your people tools–including AI–in one place.

Save time, get more done.  
Switchboard lets you unite all your AI tools, people, and projects in persistent rooms for more productive teamwork.
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What are the benefits of AI for businesses?

AI isn't just a buzzword—it's quickly becoming an integral part of business operations across industries and sectors. The benefits it offers–cost savings, increased productivity, and data-driven decision-making–all boil down to one thing: saving time. 

AI is great for automating repetitive tasks or generating data-driven insights. This frees people up to focus on doing what they do best: Relationship building, collaborating, and creative thinking. 

For example, let's say your product team needs to enhance the content recommendation process for their mobile app. By analyzing user behavior and preferences, the AI algorithm suggests diverse news articles. With the time and effort they save on manual content curation, your team can concentrate on collaborating with your content team to produce even more helpful content. 

According to Tim Lockie, CEO of The Human Stack: "That's the promise of technology and, more specifically, automation. It's going to make your life easier and save you time. That's all people really care about: They want to know if they can do their job, if they can do it faster, and if their boss will notice." 

Let’s take a look at that in more detail. 

7 ways businesses use AI to work together faster

AI enables businesses to become more nimble and productive by automating repetitive or manual tasks and making internal processes more efficient. It also provides real-time insights and analysis faster than humans can. 

Let's dive into the seven different ways you can use AI to save time and be more productive. 

1. Task automation

Whether it's data entry, report generation, or process automation, AI technology automates manual and repetitive tasks so you can focus on higher-level projects and thinking. 

Without the need for human intervention when completing a simple task, it's estimated that automation could do tasks that account for 21.5% of hours worked in the US by 2030.

Let's say your customer success team is responsible for managing customer feedback and inquiries through email. They receive a high volume of emails from users, including feature requests, bug reports, and general inquiries about their software. To save time, the team decides to integrate an AI-driven sentiment analysis tool like Idiomatic into their workflow. 

Based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis, AI categorizes and tags each email into predefined categories, such as "bug report," “problem with uploads,” or "general inquiry." It can also assign priority levels to emails based on urgency and help them write emails faster. 

Before implementing AI, team members had to manually read and categorize each email, a time-consuming and repetitive task that often led to delays in response times. With AI, incoming emails are automatically sorted and tagged within seconds. This frees up time, allowing them to focus on addressing specific customer needs and resolving issues more efficiently.

Pro tip: Use tools like Zapier to help you create automated workflows and processes that send information from one app to another. Get a "zap" to your internal communication tool when a task moves to the next stage. This increases visibility over task status and saves you time manually checking.

2. Note summarization

AI lets you quickly condense lengthy documents or meeting notes into concise summaries or action items. This can be useful for those working async who need to get the information they need even when their schedules don't align for synchronous meetings.  

Cross-functional teams also benefit from AI-generated summaries because they maintain a consistent format and level of detail. This ensures all team members receive the same key takeaways and ensures everyone is on the same page.  

For example, your product team can use AI note summarization to save time during project development meetings. Swithboard's AI tool automatically generates brief, actionable summaries of sticky notes from meetings or brainstorming sessions, so you don’t have to. It also means team members working async don’t have to review everything in the room to get up to speed. As a result, team members get concise, informative summaries to improve decision-making and increase efficiency in project management.

3. Brainstorming and ideation

AI should be used to supplement human intelligence and creativity, not replace it. However, using these tools can give you a starting point for creative brainstorming sessions with your team. 

Generative AI tools like Open.ai, otherwise known as ChatGPT, help you create compelling storylines, dive into relationships between complex ideas, and generate strategic plans and proposals. This can help spark your creativity while keeping ideation focused and relevant to your project. Switchboard’s AI tool also provides a similar function in-room, which helps with brainstorming or when you’re stuck for an answer. 

Of course, you always need to fact-check and revise content produced by AI, but it’s a great “second brain” to get you started.

Pro tip: Open any browser-based AI tool, as well as project roadmaps, backlogs, and customer reviews, directly in your Switchboard project room for more focused brainstorming and problem-solving sessions.

4. Search engine optimization (SEO)

AI tools can speed up anything from content creation and optimization to keyword research and technical SEO. 

By analyzing user behavior on websites, AI helps you identify and address issues that may affect the site’s position in Google searches. For example, high bounce rates or slow-loading pages. AI also lets you analyze competitor websites and SEO strategies quickly, providing valuable insights to refine your own SEO and adapt to changing market trends. 

For instance, your product marketing team might use AI to speed up keyword optimization, perhaps in collaboration with your SEO strategist. Tools like Google Analytics 4 offer an advanced AI toolkit to analyze search trends and user behavior. This lets you spot the most relevant keywords for each product category and page. It then automatically updates product descriptions and meta tags to make sure keywords sound natural—which means your product pages are likely to rank higher. 

5. Data analysis

AI can analyze customer feedback and social media data to gauge customer sentiment and enhance brand perception, known as customer behavior and sentiment analysis. It also uses predictive analytics to forecast trends, helping anticipate market shifts and demand changes.

With the ability to quickly scan social media comments and customer reviews at scale, you get a more comprehensive view of the customer experience—and insights into how to improve your product. Real-time analysis also lets you make immediate, informed decisions about how to personalize the customer experience. This ensures you're not falling behind the competition and are creating solutions that actually help people. 

Tools like Amplitude AI also automatically generate charts, graphs, and dashboards to help you visualize your data. This makes it easy to present and share your insights and allows team members to understand and communicate findings faster. 

Product teams can use AI systems to identify patterns within data and spot insights and trends that may not stand out to the human eye. They can then train it using machine learning algorithms to recognize specific patterns relevant to their product or industry. For example, patterns in product recommendations or preferences help business owners jump on trends like new app features, etc.  

6. Contract analysis

AI-powered systems can review contracts and legal documents, extracting relevant information and flagging potential issues. By identifying data and text–like parties involved, dates, clauses, obligations, and pricing terms–AI can save a ton of time and significantly reduce human error.  

AI can also summarize lengthy contracts, highlighting essential terms and conditions. These summaries make it easier to quickly understand the nature of the contract and know what you’re signing off on.   

Tools like ContractPodAi can also give your product and legal team customizable contract templates for suppliers, vendors, or licensing that adhere to legal and regulatory standards. As always, AI-produced contracts need to be revised by a human, but it significantly speeds up the process of creating watertight, industry-specific contracts.  

7. Content generation

For your marketing team or UX writers, finding the right words can be a time-consuming task. On top of that, they need to invest time in proofreading to catch spelling and grammar errors. This can translate to several days' worth of effort for a single copywriter working on your product's landing page.

However, tools like Grammarly's AI writing assistant, GrammarlyGO, can speed up the writing process. For example, by quickly drafting internal communication guidelines or project proposals. It not only identifies spelling mistakes but also provides suggestions to improve sentence structure and readability. It also simplifies the task of adjusting tone and formality, refining sentences to match your desired voice.

Another valuable time-saving tool is Copy.ai. It's a handy resource for instantly generating social media posts, website content, and blog articles. The software even features “Chat by Copy.ai,” which is an AI tool that swiftly scours the internet for current sources, generates personalized content, and repurposes existing material for social media posts or newsletters.

By reducing the time spent on revisions and error-checking, your team can focus more on capturing your unique voice, solidifying your brand position, and creating compelling content that truly resonates.

How Switchboard improves team productivity

Improving productivity starts with the right tools, and Switchboard lets you bring all of them together in dedicated, persistent project rooms. 

During product and design reviews, you can get all your cross-functional team together and open up all the browser-based apps, documents, and files they need—including time-saving AI tools. Switchboard makes everything multiplayer, so you can all work on things side by side, without sharing screens or waiting for your turn to contribute. 

Keeping everything organized by project in persistent rooms means design, product, and engineering teams have equal access to information in and between sprint planning meetings. It also saves time toggling between different tools, files, and browsers to find what you need. 

Switchboard also saves your work, so everything stays right where you left it after the meeting. That means anyone working async can hop in and catch up on progress with AI-generated sticky notes summaries or the room recording. No need to share materials or updates after the meeting. 

You can also pull AI-generated reports and meeting content into your room–bug reports, product metrics and notes, or your CRM–to create a comprehensive project dashboard and keep everyone on the same page.  

All this leaves you and your teams free to get more work done and focus on finding product-market fit and understanding customer needs.

Artificial intelligence: Your time-saving personal assistant

From automating repetitive tasks to personalizing customer experiences, enabling data-driven decision-making, or visualizing big data, AI offers huge time- and cost-saving benefits. However, you need to know how to implement it in day-to-day work to make the most of it. 

By using sentiment analysis, automating manual or repetitive tasks, and analyzing huge data sets at the speed of light, AI speeds up data analysis and classification, search engine optimization, contract analysis, and content creation. This leaves your team free to focus on other, more important elements of their work, like creativity, innovation, and building relationships. This can make them more productive and help you stay competitive with data-driven insights about the market and customer needs.  

When you use Switchboard as your single source of truth for project work, you can unite all your collaboration and AI tools in one persistent room. This eliminates unproductive context switching and siloed working and information—so you have more time for deep work and side-by-side teamwork. 

Save time, get more done. 
‍Switchboard lets you unite all your AI tools, people, and projects in persistent rooms for more productive teamwork.
Sign up for free.