Understanding AI Chatbots - 5 Use Uses for an AI Copilot

Buckle up! Artificial Intelligence powered virtual assistants, often referred to as Salesforce SMS App will pilot the next leg of your growth journey. Imagine composing an email in 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes, drawing insights from customer data in seconds rather than working sleepless nights, or getting the entire history of customer interactions on your smartphone in a single click. This is the power of an AI chatbot or copilot. It represents next-generation innovation by leveraging generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) technology where all you have to do is tell the copilot what you want and have it served instantly to you.

While hundreds of millions have flocked to the latest generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT ever since its launch in 2023, a copilot takes AI to a whole new level. AI copilots are not your normal bots that you find on a website. They are in an invisible conversational AI layer that seamlessly weaves into your everyday workflow by connecting organizational data and business processes to deliver indelible user experiences.

In layman’s terms, a copilot flies the plane for you if you are the captain while you sip your coffee. In business, this translates to someone doing all the heavy lifting on your behalf. The most exciting aspect of an AI copilot? You just tell it what you want it to do in plain language, and voila! Copilot technology is now being applied by businesses across sales, marketing, customer support, training, and more across industries and functions. If you’re a knowledge worker, an AI copilot is your BFF.

Industry research indicates that 55% of the global workforce is already using generative AI on an intermittent basis (1-3 times a week), but they are yet to witness measurable productivity gains. We are at the cusp of the tipping point as generative AI integrates into everyday workflows. It is predicted that generative AI technology will translate to 300 billion man-hours being saved every year by 2030. That’s a lot of zeroes to ignore.

So, how do these productivity monsters go about their job? Just like any popular AI platform, copilots leverage large language models (LLMs) to deconstruct enormous amounts of data in seconds. Not only that, they take the output and execute the tasks for you. Given their unique and extraordinary functionality, AI copilots are at the cusp of transforming every business function. It makes sense therefore to become an early adopter.

The obvious next question is, “How can I use an AI copilot at work?” To answer this, we’ll talk about some of the common ways to use AI copilots at work, as well as look ahead and plan for the future.

AI Copilots for Sales Professionals

Sales professionals spend up to 15 minutes composing an email for a customer. Being able to dish out more emails in the same time unlocks true value for these professionals.

If you are a Salesforce customer, imagine you are empowered with an AI-powered Salesforce chatbot within your CRM console that creates tailored email drafts personalized for each individual customer. These aren’t your one-size-fits-all vanilla messages. Generative AI can leverage CRM data for past interactions and customer preferences to automatically segment your audience and then draft personalized emails and text messages to significantly improve engagement rates.

Sales professionals can also use an AI copilot to prioritize tasks. For instance, you can ask your Salesforce app to give you the top three sales leads at the start of your workday. A copilot will do that in seconds and more, like give you context. The AI assistant can serve up recent news articles about the lead with important information to drive the next steps for eg. they are planning to invest in new geographies or about to announce the launch of a new product line.

Once you’ve established contact with a lead, the AI assistant can summarize conversations and highlight customer needs and preferences. It can also generate comprehensive sales summaries by merging call data with all account information and history.

Hit a wall and unable to figure out the next steps to move a deal forward? An AI assistant can review contacts, recent email exchanges and call data, and meeting summaries to recommend the next-best actions. For instance, if a customer is ready to close, the AI copilot can automatically send them detailed information about your offering and a limited-time offer to nudge them to close.

Based on the customer’s preferences, the AI copilot can even suggest meeting times via the native Salesforce Texting app. Once the customer confirms, the copilot can:

• Generate a task list.
• Draft an email for key people which you can review, edit, and then hit the send button.
• Mark the deal as closed and update the CRM with all relevant details.

This kind of end-to-end support is possible when your AI copilot has access to all organizational data accessible at a unified place. While many businesses have siloed data across departments, using a CRM like Salesforce can unify all that data into a single place to reap the full benefits of AI copilots.

AI Copilots for service teams

If you are a business leader, you already know how critical customer service is to your business and chatbots aren’t new to you. With an AI copilot, however, you turbocharge a service agent’s ability to resolve customer issues. AI copilots can intelligently access the most relevant information about a customer quickly to help service reps close cases faster, allowing them more time to work on more complex problems that require their immediate attention.

Let’s look at a scenario. A customer raises a ticket for an excess billing for their monthly internet usage. The service rep simply asks the copilot to:

• Retrieve the billing information for the said period.
• Retrieve the purchase order and relevant agreement terms for the service.
• Compare the bill amount for the current period with the same period in the previous year.
• Retrieve service usage information and analyze if there is any increase in usage.
• Discover if there have been any changes in pricing or agreement terms.
• Draft a proposal on how to address the case.

Now in traditional businesses, gathering all this information could take an agent several hours and they would have to connect with several departments with their data spread across multiple systems. All the associated delays will, in most cases, cause unnecessary frustration for the customer as well as the agent.

AI assistants for self-service customers

The verdict is clear and emphatic: Customers don’t want to call a business for routine service requests or issues. Salesforce research indicates that 60% of customers prefer digital channels such as text or email to interact with businesses for simple issues such as checking the status of an order or updating an address.

How can an AI copilot augment these interactions? AI copilots go one step further than regular chatbots. They don't just provide a link to assist customers to complete a task. They can dive into the company knowledge base, customer data, and other relevant sources to serve up personalized data. This level of self-service with conversational functionality such as provided by a Salesforce messaging app provides more human-like interactions that customers expect.

AI assistants for retailers

Brands across the world have been leveraging product recommendation technology for several years but these engines lack the personalization and attention to detail that customers have come to expect. AI copilots are about to change the way the retail game is played.

Now, a customer can simply type "Show me a tuxedo I can wear to a formal dinner” on a retailer’s website and the AI copilot will serve up relevant options. In the background, the AI copilot is leveraging machine learning algorithms to understand natural language prompts to quickly throw up the best-fit results to the customer.

Using this example, an AI copilot can also be a digital concierge, helping customers discover the right product via a normal human-like conversation. The AI assistant would draw on the customer’s profile to recognize intent and give recommendations based on purchase history and preferences.

AI assistants are a potential game-changer for retailers. Complex tasks such as managing catalogs and personalizing product promotions can be executed easily by AI copilots by simply asking them to perform those tasks. They can also analyze past sales data to understand what sells more than others and leverage that understanding to create product descriptions in multiple languages. Marketing professionals in retail businesses can save significant amounts of time by asking their AI copilot to craft a targeted promotion for a specific customer segment for eg. creating a promotion for snowboots for loyalty program members. And like in any technological innovation, early adoption holds the key to deriving long-term benefits.

AI Copilots for marketers

Marketers spend a lot of their time doing research to analyze trends, understand customer behavior, create customer segmentation plans, and establish product competitiveness. They also spend a lot of their time to create personalized messaging content.

If you are a marketing professional, you can ask your AI copilot to:

• Analyze customer data to refine customer segmentation, and tailor marketing strategies to work on a more personal level.
• Craft marketing content uniquely tailored for each customer segment.
• Track and analyze how your customers are engaging with your brand at every step of the marketing journey and then recommend the next-best actions.
• Leverage customer data to establish which channels they prefer, and what topics they like, and then personalize your offerings and other information on those channels.
• Understand how customers prefer to communicate with you, where their interests lie, and prioritize your messaging aligned with their preferences and interests.

AI has already demonstrated that it can automate routine tasks, process large amounts of data quickly, and help businesses make data-driven decisions across functions. Now, with AI copilots, we’re at an inflection point similar to how smartphones changed the way we interact with the world.

AI copilots have access to all business data – structured and unstructured, which means their actions can be derived from data that previously could not be analyzed such as PDFs, presentations, web pages, and emails, marking a transformational shift in the way businesses function.

Today’s customers have a plethora of options to choose from and it's only natural for them to become extremely demanding. They want effortless experiences and are willing to pledge their loyalty to brands they can rely on. They recognize innovation when they see it and are potential ambassadors for your brand once they like what they get from you.

AI assistants are not here to automate people out of a job but to help them do more and help them shine in their current roles.

Driven by our core values of trust, customer success, and innovation, at Girikon, we bring the power of CRM, Artificial Intelligence, and Data together to unlock real value for our customers.

To learn more about how your organization can harness the power of CRM, AI, and data, connect with one of Salesforce AI services experts today.