“Do you use AI? What AI tools are you using? Do you see any ROI?” If you’ve scrolled LinkedIn or Reddit recently, these questions regarding AI business strategy are everywhere. Here’s the catch: there’s no universal answer. AI has proven its potential, but it also comes with risks.
Unity, a game development platform, suffered a $110M loss when bad data corrupted its machine learning (ML) algorithm. Meanwhile, Snack Brands, a snack food supplier, cut its weekly SKU runs by 62%, using AI to streamline production. So, should you invest in AI? And if so, how can you approach it smartly?
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To find out, I dug into 17 companies across industries, pulling together actionable insights on the benefits and challenges of AI in business. Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
- AI and Business Strategy: Before vs. After
- 7 Benefits of Using AI for Business Strategy with Real Examples
- 4 Challenges of Using AI for Business Strategy
- How to Implement AI into Your Business Strategy in 6 Steps
- AI in Business Strategy? The Extra Gear, Not the Driver.
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AI and Business Strategy: Before vs. After
Before AI, business strategy often relied on slow processes and incomplete data. Teams made decisions based on gut instincts, outdated spreadsheets, and chasing trends that had already peaked. Predicting market changes, understanding customer behavior, or optimizing workflows felt like shooting in the dark.
Add AI to the mix, and now everything’s changed. Businesses can harness real-time insights, automate repetitive tasks, and predict outcomes with incredible precision. Let’s look at a few key areas where AI has transformed business strategy:
1. Decision-Making
- Without AI: Decisions rely on old reports or gut instinct. By the time you act, the situation has likely already changed. A good example would be decisions about stock replenishment based on outdated weekly sales reports and seasonal trends.
- With AI: You get real-time data, and even weather patterns, so decisions are always current. You can adjust marketing or inventory on the fly based on market changes.
2. Data Processing
- Without AI: You’re stuck manually sorting through endless spreadsheets, complex formulas, surveys, and reports. The process is slow, and it’s easy to miss key insights or trends buried in the data.
- With AI: AI sifts through mountains of data in seconds and finds patterns and insights that would take humans weeks or even months to catch. For example, it can spot shifts in sales trends in real time, so you can act before things go sideways.
Pro tip: HubSpot Academy offers a free course on collecting and acting upon transactional data with AI curated by Senior Professor Crystal King. Check it now.
3. Customer Understanding
- Without AI: Marketers collect data through surveys and focus groups and rely on static analytics and social listening tools. This method provides data but is not as polished or thorough as AI.
- With AI: AI monitors customer behavior across platforms, tracking everything from website visits to social media interactions and their sentiment. This produces a more segmented and precise vision of your customers, opportunities, and messages that resonate with them most.
By letting AI study search queries from within your ecommerce website, you will also discover opportunities to widen your stock with new products.
4. Predictions
- Without AI: Forecasts were based on historical data alone, often with long delays. Anticipating market shifts required weeks of manual analysis.
- With AI: AI combines past data, real-time trends, and factors like weather or politics to predict outcomes and market shifts. Need to know next quarter’s sales? AI gives you the insights to plan confidently.
HubSpot recommends: Predicting Customer Behavior and AI: My Journey to Understanding the Customer Mind [+ Pro Tips]
5. Resource-Intensive Processes
- Without AI: Laborious. Exhausting. Running key operations like fraud detection, R&D, screening resumes, pricing strategies, or competitive analysis requires a whole team and hours of work, and is still error-prone.
- With AI: AI automates these processes, from flagging anomalies and predicting potential risks to adjusting ads’ bets in real-time and moving budgets to top-performing channels.
6. Scalability
- Without AI: Scaling means hiring more people, investing in more infrastructure, and adding costs across the board. It’s a slow and expensive process.
- With AI: AI grows with you. As your business scales, AI handles more data, customers, and tasks without you needing to hire a huge team.
Watch how a centralized HubSpot Service Hub reduces the time of customer reps while maintaining stellar customer service.
7 Benefits of Using AI for Business Strategy with Real Examples
Still doubt AI is a thing for your business? Historically, breakthroughs like the printing press or railways started as speculative bubbles but completely transformed how information is consumed and how people travel. (Austria almost ditched their emperor for spending on railways instead of wars!)
AI follows a similar trajectory — what might look like a trend now could, and will, create entirely new industries and markets.
The list of benefits is long, but I’ll focus on a few that matter most:
Competitive Advantage
AI gives businesses an edge by automating tasks, speeding up decisions, and spotting hidden insights. Automotive tech group Forvia realized their larger competitors were pulling ahead, and they needed to scale fast.
To do so, they turned to AI with the Eightfold Talent Acquisition tool. The results were impressive: a 3.5X increase in visitor-to-applicant conversions, 90,000 applications from 70 digital recruiting events, and a 30% productivity boost — all thanks to AI.
Predictive Analysis
AI boosts predictive analytics by processing huge amounts of data and making accurate predictions on pretty much anything in your business — even customer attrition and the “whys” behind it.
Case in point: A fitness app with 75 million users partnered with InData Labs to integrate AI and enhance user experience. InData Labs revamped the app’s data storage using PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Apache Spark, adding 10 dashboards for real-time insights on key metrics. They also built a machine learning-based recommender system that personalized workout plans based on user data.
The result? A smarter, more engaging app that delivers personalized experiences and scales way better than before.
Pro tip: What I love most about AI in prediction is how it fits perfectly into lead generation. Take HubSpot’s predictive AI lead scoring to automatically analyze and adjust lead scores based on metrics like email engagement and pricing page visits. Strike when the iron is hot.
Personalized Marketing
Personalized content at every stage is the user journey isn’t a “nice-to-have” anymore; it’s a “must-have.”
Your customers wanna feel like you’ve created content just for them. But it’s not just about those catchy lines anymore. Today’s content needs examples and visuals like a well-crafted video to really grab their attention.
Over 80% of consumers want more video content from brands, but creating videos at scale has always been a pricey move, usually reserved for big companies with big budgets.
So, if you wanna add videos to your business strategy, there’s a cheaper way — and I gotta say, after testing Idomoo for one of my clients, it’s straight-up magic.
With tools like Idomoo’s, you can turn any written document, like customer support guides or web pages, into a cool AI-generated video in no time. This “doc-to-video” feature is just one of many ways AI’s shaking things up — you can also turn knowledge bases, websites, and more into personalized videos voiced human-like.
Plus, this type of AI learns your brand's story, picking up your style like a pro designer. You can scale up video production while staying on-brand, and all without the hefty price tag.
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Better Customer Support
Customer support and engagement have never been easier thanks to AI. It handles routine questions and fetches relevant articles from the knowledge base. It reroutes requests to relevant agents, labels them with priority, asks follow-up questions, and more.
This not only keeps customers happy but also sharpens the whole business strategy by improving efficiency and opening doors for upselling.
Take Camping World, for example.
They turned their call center around with IBM’s AI-powered assistant, Arvee.
The results? A 40% boost in customer engagement and wait times slashed to just 33 seconds. Plus, agent efficiency jumped by 33%, giving agents more time to handle complex inquiries and generate extra revenue. It’s a win all around.
Smarter Inventory Management
AI assistance made it much easier for businesses to keep up with demand, reduce waste, keep products in stock, and make smarter restocking decisions.
Walmart proves my point. They use AI to track 500 million events and handle 1 million transactions every day, giving them a clear, up-to-date picture of their inventory across all stores. Their advanced replenishment system processes billions of messages daily, creating detailed restocking strategies in just hours.
Improved Operational Efficiency and Agility
AI in business automates tasks, speeds up workflows, and helps make quicker decisions. This lets businesses stay flexible, optimize resources, cut costs, and increase overall productivity.
For instance, Delta Air Lines uses AI to make its operations smarter and faster. On the customer service side, AI helps agents quickly access answers to common questions, cutting down wait times and improving the customer experience.
This tech also helps optimize pricing by analyzing data and recommending what customers are willing to pay for premium services.
Production Optimization
Finally, AI is revolutionizing production.
It predicts demand, streamlines workflows, and adjusts when needed. This reduces downtime, improves resource use, and avoids delays. It also helps plan maintenance and aligns production with demand.
The best example here is Snack Brands. This major Aussie snack food supplier used RELEX AI-powered planning tools to solve tough production challenges.
With many products and constant updates, their schedules were getting messy. By using AI to optimize sequencing, they cut the number of SKUs run weekly from 40 to just 15. This reduced plan generation times by 50%, improved production flow, and aligned output with customer demand.
4 Challenges of Using AI for Business Strategy
There’s no doubt about AI’s potential to transform operations and drive growth. But it's not all smooth sailing. Issues like data bias and poor-quality inputs can derail even the best strategies.
Here are four challenges I’ve seen businesses face when bringing AI into their plans.
Data Quality, Accuracy, and Availability
For AI to work, it needs clean, reliable data. If the data is poor or incomplete, it can throw off AI, churning out bad predictions and wrong decisions. And let’s be real: we still run into issues with made-up or inaccurate info.
To safeguard themselves, businesses need strong data pipelines and observability tools to catch and fix problems quickly. Without that, AI won’t be able to deliver the competitive edge it promises.
For example, Unity, a leading game development platform, suffered a $110M loss when bad data corrupted its machine learning algorithm for ad placements.
This error not only impacted growth but also required costly fixes to restore functionality, highlighting the risks of poor data management.
Pro tip: HubSpot's Breeze AI simplifies tasks across marketing, sales, and customer service. Breeze Copilot helps automate your work, while Breeze Agents handle everything from content to outreach. Breeze Intelligence keeps your data fresh and actionable and helps you make better decisions without the extra effort.
Safety and Security
AI brings innovation, but it also opens doors to new risks, particularly in cybersecurity. So, you’ve got to protect sensitive information before incorporating machine learning.
In 2023, global malware attacks hit 6.06 billion — a 10% jump from the year before, according to Statista. The market suggests AI had a sheer influence on it.
The Creativity Crisis
Our marketing and AI survey found that 43% of marketers use AI to create content. Since content is a big part of almost every business strategy, this brings us to the problem: AI can totally mess with creativity.
It works by analyzing patterns and spitting out content based on what it’s learned. While that’s great for efficiency, it makes everything feel a bit … unoriginal.
Don’t lean too much on AI; the unique, human spark that makes content stand out can fade. Over time, it risks turning bold ideas into cookie-cutter results.
AI Bias
Since AI learns from past data, it can inherit existing biases. This can lead to skewed results, unfair decisions, or even the exclusion of certain groups, damaging your brand’s reputation. Left unchecked, AI bias can ruin your strategy entirely.
Actually, according to DataRobot’s 2022 survey, data bias can result in up to 62% lost revenue.
How to Implement AI into Your Business Strategy in 6 Steps
AI can completely change how you work and make your business better. But only if you do it right. So, how do you incorporate AI into your business development strategy so it works in your favor?
Let me take you through a practical 6-step guide.
1. Identify areas that can benefit from AI.
First things first: not everything in your business needs AI. Focus on areas where automation or data-driven decisions can make the biggest impact.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Are there tasks that are repetitive and prone to errors? AI can automate these, freeing up your team for more important work.
- Do you have tons of data that could reveal valuable insights? AI can process it quickly and spot patterns that might get missed by humans.
- Can AI improve customer interactions? Chatbots offer 24/7 support, and personalized recommendations can enhance shopping.
- Can your operations be streamlined? AI can optimize logistics, predict equipment failures, and improve quality control.
2. Choose the right tools and technologies.
There are tons of AI tools out there. Roll up your sleeves to pick those aligned with your tech stack and business needs.
More things to focus on when selecting the AI tool:
- Choose a tool that can scale as your business expands. You don’t want to “outgrow” it too quickly.
- Look for something your team can pick up fast.
- The best tools let you tweak them to match your brand’s style and strategy.
- Make sure there’s reliable support and resources to help you make the most of the tool.
- Ensure the tool meets security standards and keeps your data safe and compliant.
- Check negative reviews to see if it’s working for other businesses and if it actually delivers results.
- The right tool should give you solid insights and reports to track performance and fine-tune your strategy.
Pro tip: HubSpot's AI tools cover a range of functions designed to streamline marketing and sales, including content generation for blogs and social posts, automated website building, professional email drafting, reporting, and a chatbot that provides 24/7 customer service, all helping startups boost efficiency and customer engagement.
3. Start small and test.
You don’t need to implement AI across your whole business overnight. Start with a pilot project. This lets you test what works without putting too many resources on the line.
For instance, if you're in retail, you can begin with AI-powered product recommendations on your website. Track how your conversion rate changes and gather customer feedback before expanding to other areas, like inventory management or customer service.
4. Train your team.
AI is a tool, but it‘s your team that makes it work. Invest in training them to use AI tools and understand the data they provide. Your team doesn’t need to be AI experts, but they should understand the tool’s core principles.
For example, if you're using AI for marketing, make sure your team understands what input the tool works on, how to interpret the AI insights, and tweak strategies accordingly.
I watched an amazing video by Jason Staats on using AI roleplay to help teams understand how it works. Here are his juiciest takeaways:
- Practice tough client conversations and develop better communication strategies in a fun, low-pressure way.
- Analyze meeting transcripts to get feedback from your team on what went well and what can be improved.
- Use a custom GPT to simulate client interactions, especially for challenging situations like negotiations.
- Apply AI roleplay to scenarios like client complaints or pricing debates to refine your team’s approach for actual meetings.
5. Monitor and optimize.
Implementing AI isn’t a “set it and forget it” deal.
Continuously monitor performance and refine your AI tools. The more data the AI gets, the smarter it becomes. Over time, you may need to adjust how you’re using AI as trends and technology evolve.
6. Maintain the human touch.
AI can do a lot, but there’s still no substitute for human expertise. Use AI to back up your team, not replace them.
Example? AI can help with lead scoring, but people build connections and seal the deals.
Best example? Zappos. It uses AI for tasks that can be handled efficiently at scale — answering basic customer queries, providing shopping suggestions, and even assisting with past orders through AI-powered chatbots.
However, when AI can't give a satisfying answer or the customer needs more detailed help (like with a complex issue or personalization), Zappos makes it easy to reach human support.
AI in Business Strategy? The Extra Gear, Not the Driver.
When we break it all down, one thing’s clear: AI is an awesome tool for shaping business strategies, but it’s not a panacea.
What I love about AI is how it speeds up the stuff that used to take forever, like real-time data analysis from different channels. It also takes care of boring, repetitive tasks and saves time.
But no, it’s not here to replace us. It’s here to help us focus on what we do best: being creative and strategic. Find that sweet spot, and you’ll be unstoppable.
How to Use ChatGPT at Work
Discover the key to unlocking unparalleled productivity with this ultimate guide to revolutionizing your workflow.
- 100 ChatGPT Prompts
- Real-World Examples
- Productivity Hacks
- And More!
Download Free
All fields are required.
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