Unleashing the Power of Generative AI Requires Understanding Your Customer
Seizing the AI Opportunity
Ready or not, no one can unring the bell heralding the arrival of generative AI.
Customers will soon be inundated with products and services relying on generative AI, and they will expect to see this technology everywhere – at home, at play, and at work.
Companies that fail to integrate this technology into their products and services may miss opportunities or fall behind competitors.
Topline Strategy research found that generative AI can reduce the workload for tasks such as content creation and analyzing text by 75 percent.
That’s a huge opportunity to add value, but it leaves a large gap to be filled by humans; delivering only 75 percent of what a customer expects will get you fired.
Those that integrate this technology into their offering in a thoughtful, strategic way will reap the benefits in the form of increased sales, more profitable interactions, and increased customer loyalty.
The Key Considerations for Integrating Generative AI Into Your Offering
Building this gap into expectations is a fundamental shift in how most companies approach software-based product design. The software is usually supposed to deliver 100 percent, and human assistance is only necessary when the process fails.
Under the new orientation required to tap the benefits of generative AI – at least, based on where the technology is now – human supervision and assistance aren’t just expected. They’re indispensable.
Knowing when and where to integrate the human touch requires a deep understanding of how your customers and competitors’ customers get value from the offering. This understanding is essential to ensure that a new offering, enhanced and improved by generative AI, can add substantial value.
It all comes down to two fundamental questions:
- Where does the product or service benefit from a human touch? Identifying the areas where human expertise, intuition, and emotional intelligence are essential. Some tasks or interactions may demand human involvement to provide nuanced judgment, empathy, or complex decision-making that generative AI cannot replicate. Companies can achieve optimal outcomes by combining generative AI and human input.
- How can generative AI enhance human interactions? Generative AI can help strengthen human interactions. By automating repetitive or mundane tasks, generative AI frees human resources to focus on high-value activities requiring critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. This symbiotic relationship allows companies to deliver enhanced and efficient customer experiences while maximizing human potential.
Where Generative AI Is Creating Value For B2Bs
The places where generative AI will create value will differ from company to company, but many firms have hit the ground running with this technology.
The firms that follow, below, have a deep understanding of where their offerings add value and how customers access them. They have leveraged this insight to integrate generative AI in ways that enhance their offerings but don’t undermine the human relationships that serve as the foundation of their brands.
- Bloomberg is developing BloombergGPT, a finance-specific large language model for sentiment analysis, news classification, and other critical financial tasks.
- Brex, an expense management platform, has introduced chat-powered spend insights and benchmarks.
- Morgan Stanley is leveraging generative AI chatbots to support financial advisors, utilizing the firm’s extensive internal research and data as a knowledge resource.
- Salesforce’s Einstein incorporates generative AI into its CRM platform, helping sales representatives analyze customer data, predict sales opportunities, and provide intelligent sales strategy recommendations.
We have also seen generative AI add value to our work with clients and our day-to-day activity at Topline.
A Topline Strategy client that provides Human Capital Management (HCM) systems uses generative AI for creating job descriptions. The AI makes the first pass, but the company then taps flesh-and-blood editors to do the rest.
In our work, we tap generative AI to categorize open-text comments from customer surveys in seconds, but that is only a starting point. An experienced consultant must refine categories and review comments before assigning individual comments to categories.
Although each use case is different, the common thread that connects them is that the companies in question have determined which functions generative AI can enhance, improve, and add to, and which tasks are better left to flesh-and-blood workers.
Ready to unlock the full potential of generative AI?
Topline helps its customers uncover and understand what your clients and prospects want and need – sometimes before those firms even know to ask for them.
Using Voice of the Customer and New Opportunity Validation research, Topline can help uncover what your clients and prospects really care about, how you stack up on those true dimensions, and how generative AI can help enhance your offering to help you win more business and charge more.
Contact Topline Strategy today to discover how we can help you harness the power of this transformative technology, adding value to your customers and developing innovative product offerings.