AI Tools That Can Actually Help Your Business

The AI revolution is here, and we can finally all go on vacation and let the “bots” handle everything. Well, not quite. Much like the flying car, the AI revolution hasn’t fully lived up to its immense hype. However, even though AI is still very much a work in progress, there are AI tools that can actually help your business. A quick online search will yield dozens of them as everyone has seemingly hopped aboard the AI train.

Of course, most of these helpful AI programs hope to separate you from your money. Given their mass proliferation, deciphering which ones are actually helpful can be a challenge. Like wandering through a used car lot, there is a mixture of gems and clunkers. Some are worth every penny, while others aren’t even worthwhile if free.

So, how do you determine which ones you should invest your limited funds, time and energy in? That is what this article is all about. While we don’t have the capacity, funds or time to try every AI program, we do have experience with these and find them worthwhile. In this article, we will discuss the following:

• The current strengths and weaknesses of AI.
• How the current state of AI affects your business.
• What AI programs we use to improve productivity.
• Why a human touch still matters.

The Current State of AI

It is important to note that commercially available AI is still in its infancy and a developmental phase. The promise of AI bots, apps or programs capable of competently handling complex tasks with little or no human oversight is still not a reality. However, AI can handle less complicated and time-intensive tasks that can drain productivity, allowing your employees to focus elsewhere. The capabilities of AI are also constantly expanding at a relatively steady rate.

With all of that said, AI does not produce what we would call a “final product.” Any AI-generated content or tasks need to be carefully inspected by you and often modified, corrected, authenticated or enhanced. For example, posting AI-written content onto a blog without ever looking at or editing it is just asking for trouble. The technology for AI to eloquently write long-form content with zero human oversight isn’t there yet, and this applies to almost anything AI-related. In the simplest terms, AI can assist you in performing a task but can’t (yet) do that task on its own.

What That Means for Your Business

How one uses AI will be different for every type of business. However, having an easy-to-understand AI policy for your employees to follow is always a good idea. For example, here at Kahn Media, we use AI to assist us but not to create final deliverables. Any client would rightfully be angry if we tried to pass off a bunch of substandard AI-generated images, written content or videos as our own work. None of what AI currently produces is up to our standards or those of our clients.

Much of what we do at Kahn Media is nuanced, demands knowledge beyond AI and requires a “human touch.” Your business is likely similar, and your customers are just as demanding. That is why using AI selectively and strategically is advisable. Authenticity plays a major role in brand building (read Why Brand Authenticity Matters and How to Build It to learn why), and misusing AI can take away from that. With that said, let’s get into what AI programs can actually help your business.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the “OG” of artificial intelligence programs, and many, including us, have experimented with it, producing varying results. Beyond its capabilities, the ground-breaking aspect of ChatGPT is its conversational nature, which gives the impression that it is easy to use and is part of the many AI tools that can help your business. However, it is essential to remember that ChatGPT is a sibling model to the more mundane-sounding InstructGPT. As the name of the latter suggests, both are programs that you need to “instruct” with a series of prompts and information. The quality of ChatGPT’s results depends upon the quality of those prompts and the information you feed it. Skip doing that and the quality of what it produces can vary wildly. This fact makes ChatGPT less “beginner-friendly” than it seems.

• Our take: Our main problem with ChatGPT is that, even with a detailed set of prompts and information, it can produce inaccurate information that it presents as factual. It is like that know-it-all friend who will always answer a question regardless of whether they know what they are talking about. While ChatGPT can be helpful in some more basic situations, it currently can’t be trusted entirely. Read our blog post on the pros and cons of ChatGPT for more information.

Grammarly

Launched in 2009, Grammarly has been around for a long time. It is among the wave of AI tools that can help your business recently infused with artificial intelligence to enhance their capabilities and appeal. For those rare few who still haven’t been exposed to Grammarly’s YouTube ads, it basically functions as a copy-editing tool. Grammarly “learns” as it corrects common grammatical errors, suggests better sentence structure and maintains a desired tone. It can even generate written content, using its “advanced text generation tool that uses AI to create high-quality, original content for various purposes, including blog posts, social media, documents, emails and more.

• Our take: Grammarly perfectly illustrates the current state of AI. While its capabilities sound advanced on paper, its edits and suggestions are not exactly perfect, with some being flat wrong. It is still worth having, but it should be thought of as a “second set of eyes” that can assist with copy editing. However, it currently cannot replace a competent copy editor or writer.

MidJourney

MidJourney is “an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.” In non-AI jargon and more layman’s terms, it can be thought of as a ChatGPT for AI-generated images and artwork. Like ChatGPT, MidJourney uses a similar prompt-based system to create imagery—the more prompts you give, the better the results. Unlike ChatGPT, it is solely focused on imagery, making it better at its task, and much of what it produces is high-quality. Our creative team uses it to generate storyboards for video production work.

• Our take: Using MidJourney to help create storyboards is an excellent example of strategically using AI programs to enhance productivity. Time is always at a premium for our hard-working creative team, and making storyboards used to be a more time-intensive process. Using MidJourney knocks a lot of time off making an internal asset that consumers don’t see.

Adobe’s AIs

The Adobe suite of programs, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Indesign and a host of others, is familiar territory for anyone building a brand. Recently, Adobe has been on a tear improving those programs with artificial intelligence. While some of these AI efforts are still in beta, they have so far been promising. One handy feature our social media team uses is Firefly’s generative AI’s ability to quickly transform horizontal photos into the optimum size for posting. Our creative team also uses Adobe’s AI in Premiere Pro to quickly eliminate video background noise and assist in Reel creation. Both are massive time savers for our teams.

• Our take: AI currently excels in performing more mundane and labor-intensive tasks. Removing background noise from a video may sound simple, but it was previously time-consuming. Adobe’s AI can competently handle these tasks, freeing our teams to focus on more important ones.

ElevenLabs

That annoying robotic female voiceover that is the scourge of TikTok (check out our blog post on how TikTok changed social media forever and what to do about it) and Instagram posts everywhere is entirely played out. Beyond ear grating, it feels as cheap as plastic covers on a green vinyl sofa. This is where ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator comes is extremely useful. Unlike other voice generators, ElevenLab’s version is more natural sounding, and there is a wide selection of voices to choose from. While somewhat creepy, it can even clone your voice or any existing one if you want something different. As a bonus, it is relatively affordable, with multiple monthly price tiers.

• Our take: ElevenLabs is excellent for a busy social media team like ours. Generating a lot of content demands a lot of voiceovers. Sourcing these voiceovers used to entail recording your own, but ElevenLabs AI voice generation saves a lot of time by simplifying this process.

ClickUp’s Brain

We have tried many project management tools, but one we seem to be sticking with is ClickUp. Like Grammarly, it has recently introduced AI to help streamline tasks. Branching out beyond project management, the lazily named ClickUp Brain attempts to replace other AI tools that can help your business. It can generate written content, write emails, summarize documents and even handle customer communications. However, our project manager reports that it works best when used with ClickUp’s core function of project management. Instantly analyzing a team’s bandwidth, creating workflows and automating other project management tasks are more within its wheelhouse.

• Our take: With only a year since its introduction, ClickUp Brain is still developing. However, it does look promising when used to assist with project management and not as a catch-all AI replacement. The only downside of ClickUp Brain is its Spirit Airlines-esque pricing structure, where almost every component is priced a la carte.

Otter.ai

Generating transcripts of interviews used to be a very manual and time-consuming process. Otter.ai is an AI tools that can help your business by using artificial intelligence to create a transcript in real-time on a computer or as an app. The neat thing about Otter.ai as an app is that it can function without a cellular connection and still generate a transcript. Once your phone gets back in service, it will automatically upload that transcript to its cloud. Otter.ai also auto-joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams to take notes automatically. It can even generate a summary of the meeting along with emailing a list of action items to those in attendance.

• Our take: We haven’t tried Otter.ai’s note-taking ability, but the rest of it has been impressive. Otter.ai was helpful when interviewing drivers during the always cell-signal-challenged King of the Hammers. We didn’t have to worry about whether our phone had cellular service, and it immediately generated a transcript from which we could quickly view and pull quotes.

Providing a Human Touch

A key takeaway from this article should be that while AI’s capabilities are impressive, a “human touch” is still required. At Kahn Media, our teams of passionate and knowledgeable employees can provide that human touch. Whether you are seeking help with content creation, digital marketing, public relations, influencer marketing, event management or social media management, our specialists can assist you. Contact us to see what is possible and how we can help build your brand.