What Generative AI Can Actually Build for Your Business?

Generative AI is everywhere. Business leaders are exploring how they can use it to write marketing copy, build code, summarise lengthy documents, or support customer service teams. 

With the recent flood of headlines and new product announcements covering generative AI, organizations are trying to figure out how to put this technology to work on practical business use cases. 

Leaders can’t seem to get their head around what use cases will actually provide tangible value to their business vs hyperbolic nonsense.  

Generative AI development isn’t about building “another chatbot” or “doing AI” because everyone else is. 

It’s not so much about deploying generative AI everywhere. It’s about finding opportunities where generative AI can solve meaningful business problems, save time working on knowledge-intensive tasks, create better customer experiences, and drive measurable value for your organisation. 

Businesses are building generative AI into intelligent applications that integrate with CRMs, ERPs, ecommerce platforms, and other business software to streamline workflows, automate knowledge workers’ most time-intensive tasks, help employees do their jobs better, and provide tailored experiences for customers. 

Ready to learn how your business can benefit from generative AI? Here’s what it can build for your business, where it creates the most value, and how you can start building beyond the hype. 

What Is Generative AI Development? 

Generative AI development is the process of designing, building, and deploying software applications that use generative AI models. 

You can use these applications to create content, summarise information, analyse data, automate tasks, or support various business workflows based on user requests and your business data. 

Instead of delivering fixed data based on set business rules, generative AI writes text, creates reports, provides recommendations, generates code, drafts responses, produces images and much more.  

Generative AI can be used to build applications your customers interact with, increase productivity of internal employees, provide your employees with a copilot or deliver enterprise-level solutions that work across your organization.  

Use Cases  

• Chatbots for customer support, empowered by AI  
• Knowledge bases and management  
• Automated proposal and quote generation  
• Contract drafting  
• Automated reporting tools augmented by AI  
• Shopping assistants
• Employee copilots to increase productivity  
• Applications for content creation  

Learn more about how AI is changing the face of software engineering. Read our guide to Why More Businesses Are Choosing AI Software Development. 

Still trying to figure out where to start? Learn how to take your idea for an AI product from concept to reality in Turning Your Idea Into an AI-Powered Application: Where to Start. 

Why Businesses Need to Look Beyond the Hype 

Since generative AI entered the mainstream, many businesses have been asking technology-focused questions instead of focusing on business outcomes. 

• Should we build a chatbot?  
• Can we integrate ChatGPT into our website?  
• Do we need to build our own AI assistant?  

Leaders need to flip the script. 

Instead of asking yourself:  

“How can we develop Generative AI?”  

Consider asking:  

“What time-consuming, repetitive or knowledge-intensive tasks could be improved with Generative AI? 

This one small shift in mindset can change your dialogue from “What can Generative AI do for us?” to “How can Generative AI help us solve this business problem?” 

Suddenly, building a chatbot simply because everyone else has one doesn't make sense. 

Instead, your business could create an AI-powered support assistant that improves ticket resolution times, enables customers to solve problems faster, and allows support teams to focus on more meaningful enquiries. 

Likewise, instead of building an application that automates writing tasks, your business could create an internal tool that helps employees draft proposals faster using approved templates, company pricing guidelines, and past project knowledge. 

Asking the right questions will help your business focus on solving real problems instead of building AI-driven solutions simply for the sake of innovation. 

What Can Generative AI Actually Build? 

As you’ve probably noticed by now, generative AI can do much more than just talk. 

While many public conversations around generative AI focus on conversational AI models, today’s technology supports a wide variety of business use cases that extend beyond customer support. 

Here are some of the most impactful use cases we’re seeing businesses build today: 

AI Customer Support Assistants 

Your support teams are answering the same questions again and again about your products, services, policies, account info, etc. 

Generative AI allows you to build an intelligent support assistant that understands customer questions, provides helpful responses, and can even guide customers through common processes. 

Unlike your typical rule-based chatbots, these AI assistants can actually converse with customers in full sentences because generative AI can understand natural language. 

Not only does this create a better experience for customers, but your support team also benefits from faster response times, reduced workloads, consistent answers across all support channels, and 24/7 coverage for common questions. 

And when built with your internal business knowledge these AI assistants are useful additions to your support teams vs. another annoying autocomplete tool. 

Enterprise Knowledge Assistants 

Do you know where your internal knowledge lives? 

Filing policies? Training documents? Technical documentation? Operational processes? Price lists? 

For most businesses, this information is siloed across multiple systems, making it difficult for employees to find what they need when they need it. 

Generative AI empowers your business to build an intelligent knowledge assistant that helps employees find answers using natural language questions. 

Examples: 

• “Where can I find the pricing guidelines?”
• “What is our return policy?”
• “Who should I talk to about scheduling travel?” 

Instead of navigating complex folder structures or reading through lengthy documents, employees can simply ask the knowledge assistant and receive a quick answer. 

Benefits of this technology include: 

• Faster access to information
• Less time spent searching through documents
• Increased employee productivity
• Easier knowledge sharing between departments
• Ensuring employees use approved information 

Intelligent Document Generation 

Did you know generative AI can help your business automate the process of creating proposals, contracts, reports, meeting summaries, and other forms of business documentation? 

We’re not saying AI will replace your lawyers, consultants, and sales professionals. However, generative AI can drastically reduce the time it takes to draft documentation while keeping experts involved in the review process. 

Armed with customer data, historical documents, business templates, project specs, and your company’s internal knowledge base, your employees can create applications that will output a first draft with only a few inputs from the end-user.  

Imagine a sales team populating customer data into an application that automatically outputs a proposal with data pulled from your CRM. 

Legal teams could build applications that generate the first draft of a contract using clauses pulled from a master contract repository. 

Instead of manually drafting documents from scratch, employees have more time to review content, make custom revisions, and approve work before sending it to customers or stakeholders. 

Sales and Proposal Assistants 

From drafting quotations to responding to RFPs, sales teams are often overwhelmed by manual tasks that consume valuable time. 

While there’s no substitute for building personal relationships with customers, generative AI can support sales teams with repetitive tasks by enabling AI-powered sales assistants. 

They can automatically write proposals, take meeting notes with customers, recommend additional products/services, create follow-up emails, and draft responses to FAQs with your company’s knowledge base. 

This will allow your employees to focus more on building relationships with customers, rather than drowning in paperwork. 

Marketing Content and Campaign Assistants 

If there’s one department under constant pressure to create content, it’s your marketing team. 

Between website copy, product descriptions, email campaigns, social media posts, blog articles, ad variations, and campaign summaries, marketers are constantly managing competing priorities. 

Generative AI can help your business streamline the content creation process without removing the human element from marketing. 

Use generative AI to help your teams draft content that starts in an AI-powered tool but is still reviewed, refined, and personalized by your employees.

AI-Powered Business Reporting

Hours of work go into producing business reports. Unfortunately, for many businesses, reporting is often the norm rather than the exception.

With generative AI, your business can automate parts of the reporting process by building applications that understand your unique business data and present insights in natural language.

Instead of manually analysing dozens of spreadsheets each week, what if your managers could ask questions like:

• “What were our top-selling products last month?”
• “Why did our customer support tickets increase this quarter?”
• “Which regions met or exceeded sales targets?”

Using generative AI, your business can build solutions that quickly surface important trends, highlight outliers, and present information in an easy-to-understand format.

The application doesn’t replace your existing business intelligence platform. Instead, it adds context to important data and saves your employees valuable time.

Personalized Customer Experiences

When interacting with modern brands, customers expect businesses to understand their needs and provide helpful recommendations throughout their journey.

From offering product suggestions to creating dynamic onboarding experiences, generative AI can help your business deliver personalization at scale.

Businesses are using generative AI to build:

• Personalized product recommendations
• Dynamic onboarding journeys
• Tailored learning pathways
• AI shopping assistants
• Intelligent travel and activity recommendations
• Personalized finance assistants

These applications help surface relevant content or products for customers based on their behaviour, past purchases, and your business rules.

Which Industries Benefit Most from Generative AI Development?

Generative AI use cases span multiple industries, but certain sectors are particularly well suited to benefit from generative AI development.

These industries often involve large amounts of documentation, customer conversations, or internal knowledge.

Here are five industries building practical applications with generative AI today:

Healthcare

Healthcare organizations are using generative AI to streamline clinical documentation, improve patient communications, summarise appointments, and automate administrative tasks.

By saving professionals time on paperwork and repetitive activities, healthcare employees can spend more time focusing on patients.

Financial Services

Banks, investment firms, insurance agencies, and other financial institutions are creating generative AI applications to automate document preparation, provide compliance support, respond to customer enquiries, and more.

Automating knowledge workers’ most repetitive tasks allows employees to spend more time building customer relationships and focusing on the higher-value financial work that can’t be automated.

Retail and Ecommerce

Retailers are finding significant value in generative AI by improving product discovery, automating product descriptions, generating personalized recommendations, assisting customers, and helping merchandisers research products faster.

These applications create better shopping experiences for customers while making content creation easier for employees.

Manufacturing

Generative AI is helping manufacturers simplify technical documentation, summarise maintenance procedures, support employee training, and improve knowledge sharing.

When technical information is easier to understand, teams spend less time searching through documents and more time solving problems.

Professional Services

Knowledge workers in law firms, consultancies, accounting firms, and other professional services organizations are starting to use generative AI to draft documents, summarise research, automate proposal writing and beyond.

Generative AI doesn’t replace expert workers. Instead, it allows professionals to focus on higher-value activities by reducing repetitive administrative work.

What Generative AI Isn’t Good At

Generative AI can do many impressive things, but it isn’t perfect and isn’t suited to every business requirement.

While generative AI is a powerful technology, here are a few areas where it still has limitations:

It Can Produce Inaccurate Information

Generative AI can occasionally generate incorrect information while appearing confident in its response. If your business uses applications that influence important decisions, workflows should include validation steps and human oversight.

It Doesn’t Know Your Business

Publicly available AI tools are trained on large datasets created from publicly available information. Because these models don’t have access to your organization’s internal knowledge, they cannot answer detailed questions about your specific products, services, processes, or policies.

It Will Not Replace Your Employees

Generative AI can help you research, write, review documentation, and search for information. But it shouldn’t be making strategic decisions for you. Or making sure your documentation is compliant with industry regulations. It also can’t build relationships with your customers (although it can help) or do lots of other tasks your team needs to do.

Security and Governance Matter

If your GenAI application will process confidential data about your company, integrations, or users/customers you build it with security and governance in mind.

Don’t tack on security, permissions, and compliance to AI applications. Build them in from day one.

Should You Build a Custom Solution or Use Off-the-Shelf AI?

Should your business use publicly available AI tools, or should you invest in custom software development?

Off-the-shelf AI applications are excellent for individual productivity, but when should you consider custom generative AI development?

When it comes to implementing AI in your business, OOTB solutions might not cut it.

Consider a custom solution if:

• You need to integrate your AI with existing CRM or ERP platforms
• You’d like your AI application to pull data from your internal knowledge base
• Your business has unique workflows which your AI tools will need to accommodate
• You want complete control over your data privacy and security
• You’d prefer customers speak to your brand, not some faceless AI platform
• You need AI capabilities that reach beyond a single department

With a custom solution, you can leverage AI technology without disrupting how your team currently works. Custom development lets you expand upon your existing business processes with AI, rather than restructuring your workflows to accommodate prebuilt tools.

Keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for AI. Think about what your business cares about most and choose your solution accordingly.

Conclusion

A lot of discussions around AI focus on what’s next or what could be possible with AI in five years or ten years.

The truth is that with generative AI you can solve real business problems today.

Businesses are creating intelligent applications that empower employees to be more productive, supercharge operations, delight customers, and leverage their organization's knowledge.

The best generative AI projects begin with a business need and work backwards to create a plan for solving that problem.

Struggling to solve a business problem? Chat with an expert today to see how we can create powerful generative AI applications for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is generative AI development?

Generative AI development is the process of designing, building, and deploying software applications that leverage generative AI models.

What can businesses build with generative AI?

Businesses can build many types of applications with generative AI, including customer support assistants, knowledge management platforms, proposal and quotation generators, document drafting software, internal reporting tools, personalization engines, and much more.

Is generative AI good for small businesses?

Yes. Generative AI platforms run entirely in the cloud, so generative AI is available to large corporations and small businesses alike. If you have a specific problem you're trying to solve, you can build a generative AI solution towards that goal.

Can businesses integrate generative AI with existing software?

Yes, Businesses can integrate generative AI apps into CRMs, ERP software, ecommerce platforms, cloud software, internal databases, and many other types of business software.

Will generative AI replace jobs?

Generative AI does not replace jobs. Instead, it augments employees’ abilities by handling repetitive tasks and allowing people to focus on more meaningful, higher-value work.