From adoption to innovation: How business teams are working with AI
How the biggest users of workplace AI—IT, sales, and marketing teams—are transforming their jobs
Businesses are in a déjà vu moment today with AI. Just as they saw in previous breakthroughs—the PC, the internet, and cloud technology—they are approaching an inflection point when broad adoption of AI is shifting into business transformation.
That’s one of the major takeaways from Freshworks’ global workplace survey of over 7,000 employees about how they are using AI in every major function of the enterprise—in IT, sales, marketing, legal, customer service, human resources, and finance. With the exception of legal, at least 50% of workers in other departments are using AI at least once per week. But even 45% of legal teams are already doing the same.
But what, exactly, are all those teams doing with AI to boost performance and productivity? We took a deeper look at the report data and other research to see how business teams that are tapping into AI the most—IT, marketing, and sales—are extracting value from these new tools.
“Leaders across industries perceive AI as a transformative technology capable of delivering significant business impact, from enhanced decision-making and operational efficiencies to personalized customer experiences and innovative product development,” says Prakash Ramamurthy, chief product officer at Freshworks.
AI in IT: Welcome relief for overburdened teams
Top AI use cases:
Data analysis: 59%
Creating content: 56%
Research and brainstorming: 54%
IT organizations have always shouldered oversized loads to keep businesses humming 24/7. They led a massive, decade-long effort in migrating companies to cloud technology; they were pushed to the limit during the pandemic, transitioning millions of workers to remote work while keeping systems and data secure.
Small wonder why they are seeking relief from new and emerging AI applications, and why they ranked first in the Freshworks study as the biggest AI adopter among all major business functions.
“AI helps me a lot,” said one survey respondent in IT. “It increases my working process and also gives me more knowledge about the productivity of my current role in the organization.”
Data analysis: In terms of specific AI applications used most in IT, data analysis topped the list in the survey. That makes sense, says Ken Gonzalez, head of analyst relations at Freshworks, because IT leaders “like to consider themselves data-based decision-makers. But often they don't have enough actual data to make that decision, and that’s where AI can help.”
Creating content: IT teams are tapping generative AI to draft technical reports and FAQs from existing content repositories and write higher-quality, user-friendly content for self-service portals. Other content-related AI benefits, said another respondent, include performing “basic administrative tasks like taking meeting minutes and summaries, and preparing reports in a short period of time.”
Research and brainstorming: One emerging benefit of AI, according to one respondent, is simply fueling creative thinking. “AI helps me [develop] different and creative ideas to meet my targets.” Other applications can help IT organizations bolster interdepartmental collaboration; one respondent noted that AI streamlines project sharing between different departments, which in turn “speeds up project completion, enabling us to take on new projects and clients, subsequently increasing revenue.”
Read also: Software developers’ new superpower
AI in marketing: Improving organizational output
Top AI use cases:
Creating content: 61%
Text/audio analysis: 54%
Research: 53%
While IT workers lead all departments in AI adoption, with 85% using it weekly, marketing teams are catching up quickly: 80% are using AI at least once per week, significantly more than any other non-technical group of workers.
The reasons are logical: Marketing leaders know that their teams need every advantage to meet consumers’ ever-rising, 24/7 expectations, and AI offers outsized potential benefits at marginal cost.
Creating content: “AI helps me with content creation,” one marketing pro noted. “I can create images from scratch and make them my own original works. AI has helped me write blogs and compose captions for social media with ease.”
Indeed, many marketing teams are already using AI to draft copy, emails, and social media content. One emerging benefit of gen AI is that it helps underperforming writers come closer to matching the content quality of higher performers.
“It helps me proofread, polish, and generate ideas for content,” added another marketing employee. “I love using AI so far.”
Text/audio analysis: Marketers are using generative AI to conduct far more advanced sentiment analysis, which in turn helps marketing teams refine and personalize customer messaging; the technology can further identify what content is high-performing and for what reasons.
Marketers are also experimenting with AI to launch large-scale strategy projects more efficiently. Marketer and entrepreneur Noah Brier, founder of marketing firm Brxnd.AI, completed a strategy project—which would normally have taken three months and a team of five—on his own in a few weeks by using generative AI to analyze and score some 30,000 articles.
“AI has the ability to take unstructured anything and turn it into something structured, and once you have that structure, you can work at insane speed and scale,” says Brier.
Research: One relatable perk for just about anyone is avoiding having to stare at a blank page. When asked how they used gen AI, one interviewee said simply, “to generate ideas for marketing and digital marketing purposes.”
Marketers are using AI to research competitors and iterate on product development. Companies like Mattel, for example, have used AI to develop concepts for products at four times the speed they had previously.
AI in sales: Helping sellers do more—better
Top AI use cases:
Creating content: 47%
Data analysis: 42%
Text/audio analysis: 42%
AI has emerged as a powerful new tool for sales teams—not to automate them out of jobs, but to augment and boost performance. As one sales pro noted in the survey, AI is already “reducing human effort in repetitive tasks, daily updates, and monitoring of data.”
Creating content: Sales teams are using AI to draft emails to prospects, craft highly personalized follow-up content, and produce custom onboarding content tailored to specific clients.
Data analysis: Three key use cases in sales are customer segmentation, lead scoring, and market forecasting. By pairing historical data with market trends, sales can leverage the new tools to unearth and convert previously unseen opportunities.
AI “helps me to enhance the quality and reduce the defects in our work,” noted one sales employee. “It offers solutions, improves analysis of the data, and increases the quality and professionalism of the job.”
Text/audio analysis: Whether it’s a Zoom, phone call, or email, gen AI can help with analyzing the audio or text to define sentiment and sharpen the sales pitch. More than that, gen AI can translate calls in any language and enable sales teams to operate globally with less friction.
