It’s both an exciting and an intimidating time. Generative AI is rapidly transforming business on a global scale. Its advanced capacities to deliver personalization, automation, and data-rich insights have catalyzed a paradigm shift in how businesses engage with customers and drive revenue. Tasks that once demanded hours of labor can now be completed in seconds, empowering commercial teams to operate with unparalleled efficiency and precision.
Businesses are introducing AI tools at a rapid pace. A 2024 Deloitte study found that 41% of organizations surveyed had already adopted Generative AI across commercial functions. Organizations that are doing so are reaping the rewards. Recent research from McKinsey found that companies that invest in AI are experiencing revenue upticks of 3 to 15 percent and sales ROI increases of 10 to 20 percent. And this is just the beginning.
Harnessing the full capability of Generative AI for marketing, sales, and customer success requires strategic foresight, education, and planning. But commercial teams will only have the confidence to continue investing in the new technology if they can see that Generative AI can immediately support revenue generation and growth. To succeed and thrive in today’s market, business leaders need to understand better how Generative AI tools can add value to their organizations and help serve their strategic objectives. Moreover, they must quickly equip multiple commercial teams with the skills required to use this technology effectively and responsibly.
The Benefits of Generative AI for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Teams
Commercial leaders have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve a wide range of processes on a sweeping scale. Organizations are already relying on Generative AI tools to generate more significant revenue and savings, and this is only the beginning. Understanding the key areas where Generative AI can benefit marketing, sales, and customer success teams can be transformative. While the precise use cases for Generative AI will be unique to individual organizations, there are four significant ways that this powerful technology can support commercial work:
- Personalization and engagement: Generative AI increases the capacity for content output, enhancing a team's ability to deliver personalized content. Highly targeted marketing campaigns can increase customer engagement.
- Automation: Generative AI completely automates many mundane and repetitive tasks. This frees marketing, sales, and customer success teams up to focus on tasks that generate value while limiting manual data entry errors.
- Data-driven insights: Generative AI quickly analyzes extensive datasets and exposes trends and patterns that could inform future business decisions. Research that could take teams months to complete is now done within minutes.
- Innovation and creativity: Generative AI creates new solutions with every new prompt. All commercial teams benefit from this deep well of creative ideas.
By considering these strengths as areas of potential strategic innovation, business leaders can identify opportunities to use Generative AI tools on a team-by-team basis.
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Generative AI Tools for Marketing
Generative AI is transforming the business of marketing at a rate unseen in decades. Some 55% of business leaders surveyed by McKinsey in 2023 anticipated that AI tools would have a significant or very significant impact on marketing optimization if introduced in their organizations. Many marketing teams are already leveraging AI to streamline their content generation and improve marketing automation, allowing them to produce diverse types of high-quality content more efficiently. Generative AI excels in customer sentiment analysis. This is giving marketers deeper insights into consumer preferences and behaviors.
Generative AI's ability to spot trends within complex datasets also delivers data-rich insights and sophisticated market research. These insights offer businesses the potential to personalize marketing campaigns and increase customer engagement.
Generative AI for Sales
While nothing can replace the personal relationships that drive sales, Generative AI tools can support and improve this critical work in multiple ways. By automating data entry and customer relationship management, Generative AI frees up sales professionals to focus on more strategic tasks. This technology also plays a pivotal role in streamlining the prospecting process for sales development representatives, ensuring their efforts are concentrated on the leads with the highest conversion potential.
Using Generative AI, sales teams can automate lead scoring and qualification, which helps them allocate their resources more efficiently. Through personalized outreach, sales professionals maximize their ability to tailor communication to meet each prospect's specific needs and interests. A 2023 survey by Seismic found that organizations using AI-powered tools in their sales enablement processes were able to achieve greater go-to-market efficiency (94%), operational optimization (92%), and greater agility and speed-to-market (91%).
Generative AI for Customer Success
Using Generative AI for customer support empowers customer success teams to address potential problems before they escalate - or even arise. By facilitating proactive issue resolution and personalizing engagement and outreach, Generative AI represents a powerful tool that can transform basic support into a meaningful interaction. It’s no wonder the share of customer service leaders using AI has increased precipitously in just a few years - by 88% between 2020 and 2024.
Generative AI’s predictive capabilities offer invaluable insights into churn prediction and prevention, helping teams identify at-risk customers and implement retention strategies. Tailored content and resources support product adoption and help educate customers about a product's features and benefits. By fostering a smoother user experience and driving value realization, Generative AI tools are a major asset to customer success teams.
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Overcoming Challenges with a Strategic Approach to Implementation
While the potential for Generative AI to benefit commercial teams is immense, working with new technology can pose risks and create new organizational challenges. Business leaders can overcome these challenges with a thoughtful and strategic approach to introducing Generative AI tools in their organizations.
As Generative AI continues to assume the repetitive and mundane tasks once reserved for skilled workers, many employees fear job losses or a devaluation of their skills. Additionally, Generative AI may fail to address niche or complex tasks unique to a particular department - which may only become clear in practice. If used too broadly without enough oversight, there is also a risk that the technology will underperform. To take one example, Forrester predicts that poorly optimized marketing content will worsen the purchasing process for 70% of business buyers. Lastly, there are well-documented risks in using Generative AI regarding bias. A recent study of more than 500 senior IT leaders found that 73% were concerned about the potential for bias in AI-generated content.
To successfully implement Generative AI without putting the organization or its members at unnecessary risk, consider these three tips for any commercial team:
- Assess organizational readiness: Companies must evaluate their current capabilities, policies, and practices. This may include data management, workforce skill levels, and infrastructure complexities.
- Develop an integration roadmap: Organizations should initiate small pilot projects or begin utilizing AI at a foundational level. Then, they should progressively scale their use cases while establishing clear objectives, timelines, and metrics to measure Generative AI's progress and impact.
- Educate and train talent: The workforce must have the skills and experience to feed prompts and monitor results to identify potential errors or inconsistencies. A company must ensure its outputs aren't hindered or affected by bias or discrimination.
Provide Generative AI Training to Support Successful Business Outcomes
The key to leveraging the exciting potential of Generative AI while avoiding potential pitfalls and risks is clear: training. Commercial teams must be educated to implement Generative AI efficiently in their current operations. By providing sufficient training and tools for teams to responsibly leverage the technology’s potential, commercial leaders can support their organizations through a period of rapid change and emerge as market leaders.
Teaching AI and data literacy fundamentals lays the groundwork for any successful implementation by ensuring all stakeholders understand how AI works and its potential impact. Further training tailored to individual use cases can then address different departments' unique needs and objectives.
Beyond equipping their teams with AI fundamentals, business leaders can support the strategic adoption of Generative AI by prioritizing overall data literacy. Increasingly, stakeholders must understand how to interpret and use data within AI systems to make informed decisions. By thinking ahead to promote continuous learning, businesses can also help keep all teams up to date on the latest AI trends and tools.
Key Takeaways
Embracing cutting-edge AI technology can be thrilling but also daunting. Proper education and training are vital to long-term success. Correlation One offers comprehensive AI training programs for businesses, ensuring all stakeholders have the skills and knowledge to seamlessly incorporate Generative AI into their operations. From customized curriculum to live, instructor-led courses, we provide the expertise and support necessary to maximize the impact of Generative AI within your commercial operations.
Talk with Correlation One today to start educating your teams on Generative AI.