6 AI Tools Your Business Needs Right Now to Claw Back Precious Time

Every enterprise is on a relentless quest for strategies to fine-tune operations, shrink costs, and reclaim time - the most elusive of all resources. Fortunately, with strides in artificial intelligence (AI), these objectives are now achievable in ways previously unimaginable. The weapon of choice leading this uprising? AI chatbots.

Chatbots now have the ability to perform introductory tasks and answer basic questions for organisations in various fields to a convincing degree, saving a significant amount of time. Also, with the right system integration, chatbots have the ability to pass on to a human for follow up, should a more nuanced dialoge be required. Here are 6 AI chatbot tools businesses can start using right now across various functions to save precious time and resources.

Customer Service

Zendesk's chatbot brings a new lease of life to customer support. Trained over a decade and armed with millions of customer interactions, this AI tool has achieved a 30% reduction in query response times. With each interaction, it grows smarter, honing its skills to deliver precise, rapid responses, transforming the way businesses approach customer service.

Zendesk already boasts some impressive statistics about its bot, claiming:

  • 250 million tickets processed with AI

  • 35.5 years of agent time saved since 2021

  • 18 billion tickets used to train its AI model

Zendesk chatbot pricing starts at around $19 / month.

Sales and Marketing

An equally compelling game-changer in sales and marketing is Exceed.ai. This powerful tool was developed over five years with the assistance of a dataset of a billion interactions. By streamlining lead generation and nurturing processes, Exceed.ai has managed to accelerate sales cycles by 25%, and increase lead conversions by an impressive 30%.

What distinguishes Exceed.ai is its pioneering role in conversational marketing. Capitalising on its extensive interaction dataset, it ensures each conversation is a step towards conversion, perfectly timing follow-ups and personalising interactions. It's not just an AI tool; it's a catalyst that transforms prospects into loyal customers, bringing a level of efficiency and sophistication to your sales process like never before.

Exceed.ai pricing starts at about $800 / month.

Human Resources

Equally ripe for transformation are the everyday employee queries internal HR departments grapple with. From leave requests to questions about company process, the need for efficient and accurate Human Resources processes is ever growing. Addressing this need is Leena AI, an AI chatbot. The product of three years of research and development, Leena AI was trained using data from thousands of real-life HR scenarios. The result is a tool that cuts the time spent by employees on HR-related queries by 40% and increasing HR process efficiency by up to 30%.

The integration of Leena AI into HR operations provides a solution to routine tasks, reducing the workload of HR personnel and allowing for more strategic focus.

Leena AI pricing starts in the ballpark of $6,000 / year.

Data Analytics

OpenAI’s clever bot ChatGPT isn’t just good for goofing off or writing copy, it will also instantly analyse and break down large datasets or even software code in plain English. Now, by default it isn’t actually great at math, and you can’t upload large datasets into it for analysis, but ChatGPT has a plugin called “Code Intepreter”, which enables both of these things. And let me tell you, using this for quick data analysis is a revelation.

Once you have enabled it in settings, you can upload an Excel spreadsheet or CSV with data and ask questions about it. It is an absolute whizz at data analysis. It can take in large datasets, crunch the numbers, spot the trends, and visualise them in a way that's easy to grasp. It's like having a personal data scientist on your team, making sense of all that data and helping you make informed decisions. Even if you're just starting out, this tool gives you the ability to harness the power of data, and that's something worth its weight in gold.

ChatGPT Code Interpreter is a plugin available to “Plus” subscribers, which costs $20 / month.

E-commerce

In the e-commerce world, let's look at Gorgias. This AI chatbot comes in handy for businesses that deal with high volumes of customer interactions and transactions. Where Gorgias shines is in customer service response times, shaving off about 20%. Faster responses can mean the world in e-commerce; it's a landscape where time truly equals money.

What Gorgias offers is not just a reduction in customer service load, but also an opportunity for your team to prioritise. By handling the everyday, straightforward queries, your team gets to focus on the harder stuff, the issues that require human judgement and creativity. In a nutshell, Gorgias helps to create space and time in your customer service department, two commodities that can't be bought, but can certainly be saved.

Gorgias comes at a starting price of around $16 / month.

IT Support

We can look to ServiceNow Virtual Agent for an example in IT support. This AI chatbot comes with years of development behind it and has been trained on a diverse range of IT support cases. It can automate routine inquiries, freeing up valuable time for your IT team. Users have reported a decrease of about 30% in ticket resolution times, improving the efficiency of their IT services.

ServiceNow Virtual Agent serves to automate a significant portion of routine IT support queries. This results in a substantial decrease in the volume of tickets reaching the IT staff. In fact, businesses have reported that up to 30% of their standard IT inquiries are now handled by the chatbot, freeing up their IT professionals to tackle more complicated, critical issues. With an automated response time under a minute for most common queries, the tool accelerates resolution and minimises downtime, improving IT service efficiency and customer satisfaction rates.

ServiceNow Virtual Agent pricing is around $200 / month.

Embracing these AI tools can truly propel your business operations forward. It's not just about saving time or money, it's about transforming the very way your business operates. The bleeding edge will only get more automated from now on, so organisations may as well start adapting to the new normal of human operators working alongside AI. The future of business is not a distant dream, it's here – it's time to harness its power and take the leap!