You're still doing things the old-fashioned way, manually entering data and reviewing documents like it’s 1989. Meanwhile, your competitors are kicking back, letting AI do the work while they scale their company.
Luckily, we’re here to help catch you up to speed. We'll explore how AI for business operations can help you, from automating finance to boosting sales.
And we've got the inside scoop on the top 10 AI tools to get you started!
We’ll cover:
What’s AI for business operations?
The top 10 AI for business operation tools (with examples)
Best practices for implementing AI in your business
Let’s get started!
What is AI for business operations?
Simply put, AI for business operations means leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing, and other high-tech techniques to automate business processes.
Nowadays, AI can handle many repetitive, boring tasks like data entry, customer service inquiries, and even recruiting.
Here are some of the ways AI can work its magic:
Ditch the data entry drama. Time to kiss those Excel spreadsheets bye-bye. AI can handle the drudgery of data entry, automatically categorizing transactions, and even spotting sneaky errors before they become a problem.
Kick those repetitive tasks to the curb. Think of all those tasks you dread — answering the same customer questions, scheduling meetings, the list goes on. AI can take care of these so you can focus on bigger-picture stuff.
5-star customer service every single time. AI can be your 24/7 customer support rep, answering frequently asked questions, and even taking care of high-complexity queries without the need for human intervention.
Simplify, streamline, enjoy. AI can analyze how your business runs, find the kinks that are slowing you down, and suggest ways to make everything run smoother. It's like having a super-efficient consultant on demand.
Get insights that give you an edge. AI can sift through mountains of data, revealing patterns and trends that help you make the smartest decisions. Think of it as a secret weapon for outsmarting the competition.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. As we’ll see below, AI can do pretty much anything, from becoming a virtual assistant to helping you balance your checkbook.
Top 10 AI tools to automate and optimize business operations
What does it do? Transforms customer support interactions by acting as a first line of support. Lindy handles routine and high-complexity questions, analyzes tickets to suggest solutions, and routes inquiries to human agents if need be.
Why automate it with AI? Automating parts of customer support improves response times, reduces agent workload, and helps customers find solutions quickly and independently.
How Lindy helps:
Works with your existing helpdesk: Integrates with platforms like Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc.
Understands customer language: Employs natural language processing (NLP) to analyze intent and context.
Suggests answers for agents: Provides relevant knowledge base articles to help agents resolve issues faster.
Transcribes and summarizes interactions: Creates easy-to-follow summaries of customer conversations.
Agents that can talk to each other: Lindy agents (Lindies) can communicate with one another to share knowledge and brainstorm solutions.
Improves over time: Uses machine learning to refine its responses and knowledge base.
What does it do? Automates the onboarding process, creating personalized learning paths for new hires. This includes tailored training modules, automated reminders, progress tracking, and even AI-driven chatbots to answer common questions.
Why automate it with AI? Make the process seamless for new employees and free up time for HR teams. This leads to a smoother transition for everyone involved and empowers new hires to succeed faster.
How WorkRamp helps:
Integrates with your HRIS: Pulls in data to automatically enroll new hires into tailored onboarding paths.
Delivers personalized learning: Tailors content and resources to specific roles, experience levels, and learning needs.
Provides real-time insights: Tracks progress and delivers data to optimize your onboarding process.
Uses virtual coaching: Offers live and recorded sessions to bolster learning within the platform.
Creates pathways to certification: Guides new hires through steps to earn industry-relevant credentials.
What does it do? Automates expense management, invoice processing, and financial reporting. It identifies spending patterns, flags potential fraud, and generates insightful reports that help businesses make informed financial decisions.
Why automate it with AI? AI-powered finance tools such as Ramp streamline tedious accounting tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic analysis and decision-making. This saves time, improves financial accuracy, and enhances overall financial health.
How Ramp AI helps:
Automatically categorizes expenses: Uses machine learning to accurately classify business spending.
Finds potential savings: Identifies ways to cut costs and optimizes your bottom line.
Provides real-time financial insights: Offers dashboards for quick visualization of your company's financial status.
Flags suspicious activity: Detects anomalies to help prevent fraud and financial losses.
Approves expenses instantly: Sets parameters for automatic approvals, streamlining the process.
What does it do? Transforms sales outreach by crafting personalized emails and follow-ups. Lindy analyzes prospect data, suggests engaging subject lines (how many times did you stare at that LinkedIn profile without knowing how to start?), and tailors message content to increase response rates.
Why automate it with AI? Personalizing outreach at scale takes time and effort across a huge variety of channels. Lindy enables salespeople to connect with more prospects effectively, which boosts lead generation and conversion rates.
How Lindy helps:
Integrates with your CRM: Pulls contact data (like job title, industry) directly from your CRM, like Zoho.
Personalizes email templates: Uses dynamic fields to insert company names, titles, etc., making emails more relevant.
Suggests ideal subject lines: Analyzes historical data to recommend subject lines with high open rates.
Automates follow-ups: Creates sequences with personalized messages to nurture prospects.
Reports on performance: Tracks open/reply rates to optimize outreach templates and timing.
What does it do? Facilitates contract drafting with AI-powered templates and clause libraries. Evisort can pre-populate contracts with standard terms, suggest risk mitigation language, and ensure compliance with internal policies.
Why automate it with AI? Manually drafting contracts from scratch is time-consuming and error-prone. AI for business operation tools like Evisort speed up the process, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and reduced legal risk.
How Evisort helps:
Intelligent search: Finds and suggests relevant contract provisions based on your needs.
Risk analysis: Scans contracts to identify potential issues and liabilities.
Version control: Maintains a clear audit trail of all changes and previous versions.
Collaboration tools: Streamlines in-platform negotiations and redlining.
Pre-trained AI models: Learns your preferences and adapts suggestions based on your company's contract history.
What does it do? Automates resume screening, candidate matching, and interview scheduling. ApplicantAI can analyze resumes against job descriptions, identify top candidates, and even conduct initial pre-screening interviews.
Why automate it with AI? Finding the right candidate is often a needle-in-a-haystack scenario. ApplicantAI helps recruiters sift through massive volumes of applications faster, minimizing bias and ensuring top talent isn't overlooked.
How ApplicantAI helps:
Parses resumes: Extracts key skills, experience, and qualifications from complex resume formats.
Predictive analytics: Ranks candidates based on their fit for specific roles, not just keywords.
Interview scheduling: Integrates with calendars and handles the back-and-forth of scheduling availabilities.
Reduces unconscious bias: Helps recruiters broaden their searches beyond traditional candidate profiles.
Automates repetitive communication: Sends follow-ups and rejections to keep the process moving.
What does it do? Simplifies the frustrating back-and-forth of finding meeting times. Lindy integrates with calendars like Google, suggests available slots based on individual schedules, and handles all the booking confirmations.
Why automate it with AI? Scheduling meetings manually is incredibly time-consuming and prone to double-bookings. AI business operations tools like Lindy free up everyone's time and eliminate those awkward scheduling clashes.
How Lindy helps:
Integrates with your calendar: Connects with popular calendar platforms such as Google, Outlook, or Calendly, for real-time availability checks.
Automatically suggests meeting times: Analyzes schedules and offers times that work for all participants. It can even pull info from previous meetings (see Meeting Scheduler Lindy) to make suggestions.
Handles booking and confirmations: Nixes the need for back-and-forth emails and calendar juggling.
Sends reminders and updates: Lindy makes sure everyone is informed and prepared for scheduled meetings.
Learns your preferences: Adapts suggestions to your scheduling habits and patterns over time.
What does it do? Legly goes through legal documents, identifying key terms, potential risks, and compliance issues. Legly helps users quickly understand complex documents and negotiate better terms.
Why automate it with AI? Contract review is often slow, tedious, and prone to human error. This AI streamlines the process, ensuring accuracy, and allows legal teams to focus on higher-level analysis and strategy.
How Legly helps:
AI-powered clause extraction and risk assessment: Legly quickly identifies key clauses and highlights potential risks.
Visualizes complex contract structures for easy understanding: Legly breaks down complex legal jargon into digestible visuals.
Offers secure storage and collaboration features: Provides a secure platform to store contracts and enables real-time collaboration between legal teams and stakeholders.
Integrates with popular document management systems: Seamlessly connects with your existing systems, making it easy to import and analyze contracts.
Customizable workflows and approval processes: Legly allows you to tailor contract review and approval processes to match your company's specific needs and procedures.
What does it do? Analyzes customer conversations (calls, chats, emails) to uncover insights into customer sentiment, agent performance, and overall call center trends.
Why automate it with AI? Analyzing large volumes of conversation data manually is practically impossible. AI tools like Uniphore identify patterns, pinpoint areas for improvement, and help companies optimize their customer service operations.
How Uniphore helps:
Real-time emotion and sentiment analysis of calls: Understanding human emotions can be complex, but Uniphore helps by assessing the general mood at the start of a call.
Automation of quality assurance processes: No need for time-consuming human reviews!
Speech analytics to identify keywords and topics: Uniphore can help scan through mountains of data to find signifiers of intent.
Comprehensive dashboards for visualizing call center data: An easy, birds-eye-view interface.
Identifies training opportunities for agents based on call analysis: Sometimes agents don’t get it right the first time, and Uniphore can help spot weak areas that can be worked on during training.
What does it do? Helps businesses, journalists, researchers, and everyday users quickly verify information circulating online. ClaimBuster uses AI to cross-reference claims with credible sources and highlight potential misinformation.
Why automate it with AI? Manual fact-checking is incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming. AI assists in rapidly analyzing the validity of claims, saving valuable time and combating the spread of false information. Businesses can use ClaimBuster to pinpoint falsehoods in their competitors' press releases — and their own if need be.
How ClaimBuster helps:
Identifies trustworthy sources: Scans a database of fact-checking organizations, reputable news sites, and academic journals.
Analyzes language patterns: Detects linguistic cues often used in misleading information or propaganda.
Summarizes findings: Provides a quick overview and breakdown of why a claim might be true, false, or require further investigation.
Tracks the spread of information: Monitors how claims are shared and amplified on social media.
Generates explainers: Offers digestible breakdowns to help users understand the context of complex issues.
Note: The existence of fact-checking tools does not remove the need for human fact-checkers and critical thinkers, though. Just saying!
Best practices for implementing AI for business operations
The last thing you want is to end up like that one friend we all have who adopts the latest tech fad before understanding how it actually works.
Here are some rules of thumb to follow when implementing AI for business operations:
Start small and scale up. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you won’t revamp your entire company with AI overnight, either. Pick one or two key areas or processes to focus on, implement the AI, and give your team time to get used to it before rolling it out company-wide.
Starting with a pilot program will allow you to work out any kinks and make tweaks before a big launch. Your employees and customers will thank you.
Get employee buy-in. Speaking of your employees, getting them on board with any new AI initiative is critical. Some may feel threatened by AI and worry it will replace their jobs. Be transparent about how AI will augment and supplement their work. Provide plenty of training and resources so they feel comfortable using the new tools.
If they’re still hesitant, start with a trial period where they can give feedback.
Continuously optimize. AI isn’t a “set it and forget it” solution. As with any technology, AI tools require ongoing maintenance and optimization to function properly. Monitor how the AI is performing and make tweaks as needed to improve accuracy and efficiency. Some AI may need to be retrained periodically with new data.
Stay on top of software updates as well, to take advantage of the latest features and security patches.
Summing up
We just flew through a whirlwind tour of the top 10 AI for business operation tools that can help optimize your business operations.
Sure, you’ll have to put in some work to implement these solutions properly. But once your AI assistant is up and humming, you’ll get back the gift of time and mental energy.
We’re talking more space to focus on the kind of innovative, big-picture thinking that will take your business from good to great.
Next steps
Lindy is not just an AI for business operations tools. It’s a jack-of-all-trades AI assistant that can create an army of Lindies to take care of different business tasks.
The best part? These Lindies don’t operate independently; they can talk to each other to maximize efficiency. Just think of what a Lead GeneratorLindycan do when combined with the Competitive Insights Lindy. Add the Outbound Recruiter Lindy to easily get a talent pool for your business, and the sky’s the limit.
Here are some other ways Lindy can help:
Banishes repetitive tasks: Lindy's template library and customization tools streamline common tasks and communications, replacing tedium with efficiency.
Works its magic behind the scenes: Lindy learns your habits and preferences, proactively suggesting solutions and streamlining your workflow without you needing to lift a finger.
Grows right along with you: Whether you're managing personal projects, supporting a team, or revamping sales outreach, Lindy's flexibility adapts to your specific goals.
Hyper-personalized outreach: Lindy tailors your message for maximum impact, ensuring your outreach resonates with potential customers.
Follow-up that never sleeps: Lindy automates nurturing sequences and schedules meetings, keeping your pipeline buzzing.
Data-driven insights: With its many integrations, Lindy analyzes your sales data and uncovers hidden opportunities for improvement.
