3 AI-based tools to simplify your business

For business owners, those running a business, or even those trying to contribute to a business, having a little help can go an incredibly long way. However, it’s not always feasible to get a VA or hire a freelancer, and capturing innocent members of the public and forcing them to do your bidding is generally frowned upon.

Enter Artificial Intelligence.

The idea of computers thinking for themselves is a little scary, but fortunately, current technology is more help-you-out and less take-over-the-world-and-murder-everybody, especially when it comes to running a business. While there are tons of intense, complicated tools out there that use artificial intelligence, there’s no need to head straight to the deep end of the pool.

Here are a few ways to dip your toes into the water, so to speak, of using your CPU to benefit C-P-You (yeah, I know, most AI work happens in the cloud, but it was funny. Sue me).

Beautiful.AI

As anyone who went through the horrors of preparing for and giving a PowerPoint presentation knows, slideshows are the worst. No, really, the actual worst.

There are a million templates out there to choose from, but somehow none of them do what you need them to. Once you finally figure out what you want to say, PowerPoint rarely makes it easy to figure out how to say it. From formatting the text properly to trying-and-failing to include visuals like graphs or infographics, it’s a mess. Don’t even get me started on animations.

Beautiful.ai takes the pain and guesswork out of creating gorgeous, effective presentations so you can focus on the content. Their platform uses artificial intelligence to quickly and easily put together slides. The elements on each slide move around and adapt to the content you add as you add it, meaning the days of playing around with resizing and moving images, text boxes, and margins are over.

Dynamic elements like sales funnels, graphs, SWOT analyses, team pages, and more are able to be added and adapted to your content with ease. Look fancy, feel fancy, and present fancy data without actually having to do all the legwork yourself.

X.AI

One of the worst parts of being in business is the endless back-and-forth of trying to schedule a meeting. Sure, personal calendar links like Calendly can cut down on a lot of the unnecessary messaging, but the whole self-service-calendar thing also takes the personal aspect out of it. Human connection is crucial in an increasingly automated world, so even something as simple as feeling like you’re talking to another human to set up a meeting can make a difference.

This is where x.ai comes in. I’d like to introduce you to Amy Ingram, the super-secret, butt-kicking appointment setter who gets your calendar right every time and never needs a day off.

Amy is the name used for x.ai’s scheduling tool, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence and email to communicate with people you need to set up a meeting with. No impersonal links, no lag time, and your prospects will never know they’re not talking to a real human being.

All you do is copy Amy on an email to your meeting prospect asking her to get something on the books with them, and she’ll handle the rest.

We love you, Amy.

Salesforce Einstein Voice

We’re all constantly swimming in a sea of data that grows deeper by the second, and trying to process it on your own takes not only the fine development of a million different skills, it also takes tons of time and energy to actually wade through the data. Salesforce Einstein can tackle both those problems by collecting, analyzing, and explaining tons of types of data for you.

While Salesforce is traditionally thought of as a purely sales-focused platform, with Einstein, you can tackle every area of your business, from marketing to customer service. It’s a comprehensive, AI-based system of tools and processes to help you get your business under control, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll focus specifically on Einstein’s Voice assistant.

By talking to Einstein Voice, you can easily update and maintain your Salesforce dashboards, refresh and add to your data, and run meetings hands-free. You can even get a specially-curated morning briefing delivered via Voice through Alexa or Siri.

Walking to your car but need to type up a few notes on the meeting you just had? Tell them to Einstein. Out for a jog and realize you forgot to set up action items to follow up with your leads the next day? Have Einstein Voice do it for you. Einstein’s natural language understanding models take your transcribed audio and do all the thinking for you, putting notes, action items, and updates exactly where they need to go.

The cool part about Voice is that it doesn’t work solely within Salesforce; if you feel like taking it all a step further, you can create voice-controlled bots that power your own apps built on the Einstein platform. Salesforce Einstein is as complicated or as simple as you need it to be, and even just the hands-free ability to easily and quickly update your CRM with your voice is a major game-changer.

Conclusion

There are million-and-one ways to streamline your business today, and AI is one of the best. Having tools that not only automate your work but also learn and adapt over time means you can focus more of your time and resources on growing your business instead of doing labor-intensive, mundane tasks. Work (artificially) smarter, not harder!