I asked 10 businesses how they ACTUALLY use AI

Summary

In this video, Greg Camad explores real-world applications of AI across various businesses. From AI-driven survey analysis at Bright to automated template generation at TASC, AI is improving efficiency and saving time. Businesses like Zapier use AI to enhance sales processes, while Pulley’s Slack bots streamline knowledge sharing. Through interviews with innovators like Mike Noob (Zapier) and Mark Erdman (Pulley), Greg highlights AI’s practical value—boosting productivity, reducing response times, and transforming workflows. The video offers valuable insights into how AI tools are making an impactful difference in daily operations and driving business growth.

Takeaways

• 😀 Businesses are increasingly leveraging AI to streamline workflows and improve efficiency. Real-world examples show AI’s significant impact on productivity.
• 😀 Greg Camad sought out stories from businesses using AI effectively, rather than hearing from companies promoting AI products. His focus was on actual value creation.
• 😀 AI-driven tools like Anthropic's Claude are being used to analyze and extract insights from large data sets (e.g., survey results, customer chat messages), saving businesses significant time and effort.
• 😀 Automation tools, like those used by TASC, enable companies to generate templates faster, resulting in a massive improvement in output (e.g., a 35x increase in template production).
• 😀 AI is transforming customer support by automating responses to common inquiries, reducing response times from 30 minutes to just 30 seconds, significantly increasing team efficiency.
• 😀 Pulley uses AI-powered Slack bots to automatically summarize work done by employees, saving an estimated hour per person per quarter and boosting team morale with positive reinforcement.
• 😀 Zapier is leveraging AI to optimize sales processes by extracting valuable insights from call transcripts and integrating them into CRM systems, contributing an estimated $100K of ARR per month.
• 😀 Mendable uses AI to maintain documentation by automatically generating drafts and identifying gaps in content. This proactive approach saves hours of manual work each week.
• 😀 AI-driven personalized onboarding recommendations, like those used by Zapier, can dramatically improve user engagement, increasing new user booking rates by 50%.
• 😀 AI tools are becoming essential for capturing and organizing tribal knowledge within teams, as demonstrated by Pulley's knowledge bot, which extracts valuable information from Slack conversations to save leadership time.

Q & A

What was the initial inspiration for the video?

The inspiration came from Greg Camad's interest in hearing stories of businesses benefiting from AI, particularly after seeing how much money companies like Zapier are making using AI. He wanted to shift the focus away from hype around new AI models and instead highlight real-world business impacts.

Why did Greg Camad prefer stories from businesses rather than AI companies?

Greg wanted to hear from businesses that were actually seeing value from AI, as he felt stories from AI companies would be overly self-promotional. He believed that hearing from businesses using AI in real-world workflows would provide more insightful examples of its impact.

How is Bright utilizing AI in their workflow?

Bright uses Anthropics' Claude, an AI tool, to manage survey results and customer chat messages. Claude helps correlate survey data, saving the team around 20 hours per survey. It also processes chat messages, extracting valuable data like feature requests and bugs.

How has AI improved template generation at TASC?

At TASC, AI has automated the process of generating templates. Before AI, the team could create only 2 to 3 templates per week, but now they generate over 100, resulting in a 35x improvement. This also boosts organic traffic through SEO.

What AI-based solution did TASC implement to handle repetitive support emails?

TASC implemented an AI solution that uses semantic search to identify similar previous email queries and automatically drafts responses. This process reduces response time from 3 to 30 minutes down to just 30 seconds, improving efficiency by up to 60x.

How is Pulley using AI in their workflow?

Pulley built an AI tool that helps employees track their work in Slack. The tool recaps instances where they mentioned their own work, saving time and helping users track career progress. It's estimated to save about 1 hour per quarter per employee.

What AI feature is Zapier using to improve their sales process?

Zapier uses AI to extract insights from sales call transcripts via Gong. The AI extracts key details and next steps, which are then entered into their CRM. This process is helping Zapier generate an additional $100K in annual recurring revenue (ARR) per month.

How has Mendable optimized their documentation process with AI?

Mendable uses an AI bot to draft new documentation based on user queries. The bot creates a Slack thread for each question, searches GitHub for relevant files, and submits a pull request with the new documentation. This saves them 4 hours per week on documentation maintenance.

What is the key feature of the knowledge bot developed by Pulley?

Pulley's knowledge bot allows employees to ask any question in Slack, and it responds with relevant tribal knowledge that was previously locked away in chat history. This tool helps save leadership time, as they no longer need to repeatedly answer common questions.

How does Zapier improve onboarding recommendations for new users?

Zapier uses AI to analyze new users' roles and companies, and then sends personalized emails with suggestions for new Zaps (automations) based on that information. This strategy has improved the new user booking rate from 8% to 12%, a 50% increase in engagement.