AI is the Key to Exponentially Growing Your Business Without Adding Payroll
The following is adapted from AI as Your Teammate.
A lot of businesses have a lot of data. There’s data in spreadsheets, CRMs, ERPs, project management tools, emails, meetings, and dashboards. There’s data in photos, videos, sales activities, audio, and PDFs.
Most of the time, this data sits idly as reference material if you’re confused or conducting research. It’s the laziest person on your team. Hopefully it is, anyway.
AI allows for all the data you have, in whatever form, to be put to work.
Think about it. Who on your team orders the inputs to make your products? Who forecasts sales? Who does QA? Who is the handoff between your sales team and your customer success team?
What if your answer to all those questions above was “an AI”? Can you imagine the possibilities?
AI Versus Automation
When I talk with people about AI, they often wonder what the difference is between AI and automation. An AI purist will tell you that simple automations are not AI. They’ll say that if it’s not a data-fed model, it’s just software.
I disagree. I use the terms “AI” and “automation” interchangeably. If a task was once done by a human and is now done by a computer, who cares about the difference?
In my opinion, the bigger question is how to utilize computers and software as a teammate. The value to business owners — small and large alike — comes in figuring out how to exponentially grow the business without increasing payroll. Whether it’s true AI or automation, that starts with freeing up your team to do work that transforms your business faster, easier, cheaper, and bigger.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking to exponentially grow your business without adding payroll, my guess is that you don’t really care about the difference between AI and automation. You care about growth and getting the job done. For that, the question I would ask myself is, “How could a computer do this for me?” or “How could a computer help my team work faster?”
Seeing AI at Work
Let me give you an example of what I mean, so you can start thinking about how AI (or automation) might be able to help your business. Let’s pretend you’re a government contractor and you need to monitor the RFP and bid opportunities posted daily.
This is an unbelievably boring job, and it’s high turnover. Beyond that, it’s time-consuming and, oftentimes, so mind-numbingly boring that there’s a significant amount of human error.
You set out to determine if a computer can monitor all the proper websites for you. Through your years of experience, you know certain keywords to look for and opportunities suitable for you. You don’t need the AI to respond to the RFP, just alert you to it.
You’re looking for software to scrape certain websites and alert you to the opportunities that may fit your criteria. For the websites that don’t allow scraping, you’re looking for an RSS feed that you can run through the AI to determine, automatically, if the opportunity is right for you.
Change Your Business for the Better
In this example, the solution ends up being a combination of website scraping plus RSS feed analysis, which then runs through an AI which determines if the opportunity is right for you. All the right opportunities get emailed to you and the leadership team each morning.
The immediate impact of implementing this solution is you find way more opportunities than you’d found before. Now, not only can you only monitor all the government websites, but you can monitor other sites that host RFPs.
Tons of RFP opportunities are miscategorized or addressed improperly, and you’re able to respond to all of them. Beyond that, you no longer need to hire someone just to manage those opportunities. Now, you can hire a new individual to respond to RFPs and close new businesses.
Over time, you build a whole system around this new AI, and it does most of your prospecting for you. You build in decision-making algorithms to help it better determine which RFPs are a good fit for you — algorithms that even take into account the specific companies you’ll be competing against.
The bottom line? Because of AI, your days of hiring someone to do this work are long gone, and acquiring new business is more stable than ever.
For more advice on how to implement AI into your business, regardless of what industry you’re in or what size your organization is, you can find AI as Your Teammate on Amazon.
Evan Ryan is the founder of Teammate AI, helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses using artificial intelligence. Teammate has launched and powered businesses such as Lede AI and ContentX, which use AI to write, edit, and publish content — all without human intervention. Over the past five years, Teammate has helped hundreds of businesses save millions of hours by using AI in everything from small tasks to complex, multi-day processes. Evan spends most of his time showing entrepreneurs how to save time with AI and designing solutions that help teams stop being human computers and start creating bigger, more dynamic value. Learn more at TeammateAI.com.
