In my role, I speak to a lot of people who depend on the written word to keep their business successfully running, whether they be executives, salespeople and – of course – bid teams and tender writers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is certainly a disrupter for all these levels of business, but it’s interesting to note that depending on job role, the view of AI’s impact, benefits and threats are remarkably different. It’s worth outlining the differing approaches to AI from these job levels in a business, and to understand further how careful consideration of the use of AI can drive business growth, without threatening total doomsday and destruction.
While we draw a comparison here between the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine and Death), the reality is that AI won’t be ushering in any of these disaster scenarios. If businesses can understand, adapt and utilise AI for the benefit of both internal teams and their clients, AI can be a force for business growth. In fact, it could be the dawning of a new age… if handled intelligently.
After all, without human input, AI is just another flashing cursor on a page, a prompt waiting and waiting… to tell your story. The stark reality is, in the end, AI is nothing without us.
As we’ve all seen in the past 18 months, the integration of AI has become more of a necessity than a luxury. From streamlining operations to enhancing customer experiences, AI offers a myriad of benefits that can significantly impact a company’s bottom line. However, this sudden rise has led to extremely fast and sometimes high-risk adoption of AI within businesses by management who haven’t fully understood both the benefits and risks of this utilisation – believing early adoption is critical to staying ahead of the competition and worth the possible brand-tarnishing disasters we’ve seen play out in the media. In this fast-paced business landscape, understanding and use of AI is not uniform across all levels and departments. Each job role brings its unique perspective, priorities, and concerns to the table, shaping the way AI is perceived and implemented.
Here’s a dive into the current thinking of business leaders facing the AI-pocalypse head on…
Strategic Efficiency: The Executive Quest for Cost Savings and Optimisation
For CEOs and CFOs, the company’s bottom line is always paramount. When considering the implementation of AI, their primary focus revolves around cost reduction and efficiency improvement. They see AI as a tool for automating repetitive tasks, optimising resource allocation, and ultimately driving profitability. Whether it’s through workforce optimisation, predictive analytics, or supply chain management, executives view AI as a means to streamline operations and maximize ROI. However, their enthusiasm for cost-cutting measures must be balanced with a strategic vision for long-term growth and innovation. Without proper foresight, the relentless pursuit of efficiency gains may inadvertently stifle creativity and hinder organisational agility, not to mention the loss of valuable IP and loss of key staff.
Streamlining Sales: Enhancing Communication and Boosting Revenue
Business Development Executives and Sales teams operate in a fast-paced environment where every second counts. For them, AI presents an opportunity to streamline communication channels, automate administrative tasks, and free up valuable time for revenue-generating activities. By leveraging AI-powered tools for leads and opportunities, customer segmentation, and sales forecasting, they can identify promising opportunities more efficiently and tailor their strategies accordingly. Additionally, AI-enabled chatbots and virtual assistants can enhance customer engagement and support, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction levels. However, sales teams must be cautious not to rely too heavily on AI at the expense of personalised interactions and relationship-building efforts. Nothing will replace those tools in the sales team’s toolkit. After all, human touch remains invaluable in cultivating trust and rapport with clients, and clients also have their eyes peeled for AI-generated interactions and emails that are clearly written by a bot or contain incorrect information.
Creative Acceleration: Empowering Writers with Rapid Drafting and Innovative Solutions
In the realm of writing and tendering, AI serves as both a boon and a challenge. On one hand, AI-powered tools can expedite the content creation process, generating drafts, and providing suggestions for improvement in a fraction of the time it would take a human writer. This acceleration allows writers and bid teams to iterate more rapidly, for initial drafts to be produced quicker, to help gather ideas and solutions from key team members who are not writers, and explore critical strategy and differentiator messaging sometimes left to very late in a bid process. However, there is a very real concern among writing professionals that the potential generalisation of content and the erosion of strategic processes in the age of AI will lead to a rush to submission which leaves all critical review gates wide open, without human input or oversight. While AI can certainly aid in efficiency and productivity of early stage drafts, it is essential to strike a balance between automation and authenticity, ensuring that human ingenuity remains at the heart of business solutions, communications, sales and delivery.
Expert Empowerment: AI Tools for SMEs to Focus on Core Responsibilities
For subject matter experts (SMEs), time is a precious commodity. Whether they are researchers, engineers, or industry specialists, their expertise lies in their domain knowledge, not in administrative tasks or documentation. Therefore, when it comes to AI, SMEs are primarily interested in tools and solutions that can streamline knowledge capture, facilitate information retrieval, and support decision-making processes. By leveraging AI-powered knowledge management systems, natural language processing algorithms, and data analytics platforms, SMEs can distill vast amounts of information into actionable insights, accelerating problem-solving and innovation. And, as a by-product, turn their technically-focused solutions into real-world, understandable written responses. However, the success of AI initiatives in this context hinges on the seamless integration of technology into existing workflows and the preservation of domain-specific nuances and expertise. The work already has to have been captured, the solution understood and outlined, before AI can help these SMEs deliver understandable content for sales and tendering responses.
As the above viewpoints attest, this isn’t Doomsday. It’s probably not a New Dawn either. It’s somewhere in between.
The adoption and utilisation of AI within a business is influenced by the unique perspectives and priorities of key stakeholders at every level of the organisation – each with important viewpoints, requirements and outcomes. While executives prioritise cost reduction and efficiency gains, sales teams seek to enhance communication and drive revenue growth. Writers will value the acceleration of the content creation process but remain vigilant against the commodification of templated, meaningless responses. SMEs will prioritise knowledge management and technical support tools that augment their expertise and support the pain-points of writing clear, intelligent prose. By understanding and accommodating all these diverse needs, businesses can harness the full potential of AI to drive their own innovation, competitiveness, and sustainable growth in the AIpocalyptic era.
Aurora Marketing – Tenders, Bids, Proposals, Submissions – delivering Human-Powered AI
Our groundbreaking partnership with Rohirrim’s domain-aware generative AI represents the introduction of Australian-first technology for bids and tenders. Our belief is that AI cannot replace your bid team, instead it is boosted by it. Our Human-Powered AI can amplify the capability of your bid team and elevate your bids to win.
Together, we’re paving the way for a future where human expertise and AI technology work hand in hand to take Australian bids and tenders to new heights.
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