Looking back at the organizations I’ve worked at, I realize now that few of them spent sufficient resources on internal tools for our teams to be faster and better at their jobs. In the past, the lack of focus on those tools wasn’t a good thing, but it also wasn’t usually a large enough competitive disadvantage to incentivize changes. Yes, some tasks were too manual. But you could be a little slow and inefficient and still perform sufficiently.
With AI, that will change.
Before AI, you’d buy some packaged, generic software for your team and that did a pretty good job. You might even build some custom internal tools. I’ve built some at my past companies that proved to be incredibly valuable. For example:
- Bookmarklet that opens a new tab to a certain page
- Bookmarklet that highlights certain terms on a page to flag them for review
- Browser Plugin that copies data from one browser tab to another to save some copying and pasting and a few clicks
- Google Sheets that are basically custom web applications to run almost any process
- Scripts to automate a long list of manual repetitive tasks
These seem simple, but they had a material and immediate return on the investment and they add up. The first three took a day or less to build. Yet, they saved operations and customer support teams 5 to 60 seconds, 2 to 40 times a day. This grows quickly to days and weeks of time saved. It also lets those teams spend less time on mindless work and focus their minds on more difficult and valuable tasks. It even improves morale by giving those teams more attention and resources.
So, most of us should already have been investing more in packaged software and custom internal tools like those even before AI.
But with AI, for many businesses, a focus on internal tools will change from a material but not vital feature to a business altering competitive advantage. Instead of saving days and weeks, AI has the potential to save months and years. Even more important, in addition to saving time, AI will perform many tasks better than people could.
New AI tools will include:
- Internal and external customer support automation: We use our AI-powered NuBot to answer our internal team questions.
- Tagging data: We use AI to tag companies with sectors and industries.
- Taking unstructured data, structuring it, and using it for various purposes: We’re working on a tool to take the body of an email, convert it to structured data, and save the information into a contacts database.
- Searching databases with natural language: We’re testing tools that allow us to search various data sources with plain english instead of an advanced search form.
- Creating and editing videos, images, headshots, blog posts, contracts, code, and all sorts of other content: We use AI for most of these purposes.
And these are just some of the early use cases.
Get ready or be left behind.
What internal tools have you seen work well in the past and what new ones are you working on?
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