What Is AI Workflow Automation Exactly?
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to start and oversee laborious or repetitive tasks is known as AI workflow automation. These include projects like data processing, analysis, and input.
By putting computers to work on these jobs instead of people, AI workflow automation aims to boost production and efficiency.
This frees up (human) professionals to focus on more complex and strategic work.
Put differently, AI workflow automation frees up time for you and your team to focus on the areas of your business that you love doing more of and less time on the ones that don’t.
What Role Does Automation Of AI Workflow Play?
Every business ultimately wants to grow in a way that is sustainable, profitable, and (preferably) moral. Routine parts of routines can be automated, allowing even small teams to achieve significant results.
The following are a few benefits of AI workflow automation for companies:
It works better. Workflows driven by AI consistently finish laborious manual tasks without putting employees at danger of burnout.
It reduces human error. Difficult projects are known to try our patience when it comes to attention to detail. Artificial intelligence automation is more reliable than humans who are tired (a harsh but true remark).
It costs less. AI software is less expensive than recruiting teams of humans while delivering outputs of the same caliber. This gives you more money to hire people for more imaginative work—the kind of work that people actually love doing.
Any size squad can be accommodated by it. Yes, big businesses can implement AI workflow automation extensively. Small companies, however, might use it to their advantage to outperform rivals.
Keep in mind that creating automated processes helps your clients in the long run by giving them a more seamless and customized interaction with your business.
In Your Company, Who Gains From AI Process Automation?
Automation of AI workflows would benefit almost every department in a company, including finance, customer service, hiring, and so forth. Still, using AI-powered workflows will probably affect two teams the most directly:
Sales
Promotion
Your company’s productivity and efficiency might increase by 100 times once those divisions start automating their workflows. No, that’s not hyperbole.
Sales Teams
The role of a sales representative has changed in the last few decades. A handwritten Rolodex was utilized for lead monitoring and follow-up in the past.
Robust customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are now accessible to even entry-level sales personnel, enabling them to maintain efficiency and organization.
Even with technology advancements to support sales efforts, a large portion of the task is still repetitive. This is accurate regardless of your specific roles in a sales team:
Business Development Representative (BDR): This role is in charge of using cold outreach and outbound marketing to fill the sales funnel.
The role of a sales development representative (SDR) is to find and qualify new leads and move them up the sales funnel.
Account Executives (AE) handle closing deals by interacting with leads through 1:1 calls, in-depth pitches, product demos, and other means.
Every one of these obligations demands challenging chores that are hard to keep up with.
SDR time management is one of the top three difficulties for 33.3% of high-growth firms, and according to Gartner data, 84.3% of SDRs fail to meet their monthly quotas.
Business Development Representatives (BDRs’) Workflow Automation
Creating new leads and filling the sales funnel are the responsibilities of a BDR. While there are several ways to do this, the most popular is cold outreach, which includes calls, SMS, emails, and social media messages.
For example, a BDR may use LinkedIn to find prospects all day long. After they’ve discovered that lead, they might try to get in touch with them via phone or email to start a conversation.
Following a lead’s response to that communication, the SDR often takes over in a CRM.
That being said, finding leads and sending pertinent messages takes more than just time.
It’s also repetitive in a tiresome way.
Customizing generic outreach templates and monitoring potential clients’ responses are common tasks for BDRs.
Artificial intelligence has made it possible to automate each of these procedures.
Sales Development Representatives (SDRs’) Workflow Automation
Where BDRs leave off, sales development representatives (SDRs) take over. An SDR will move a cold prospect along the sales funnel if they engage with your company’s messaging or content and turn “warm.”
This can take many different forms, but it usually requires a great deal of follow-up communication across multiple channels (mostly social media and email).
SDRs deal with incoming leads that reply to cold outreach from a BDR or a marketing campaign (by completing a form, subscribing to a lead magnet, etc.). They will therefore require strong organizational abilities to make sure their words are received.
SDRs may deliver timely and targeted follow-ups to new prospects without losing any leads by utilizing AI automation tools.
Account Manager (AE) Automation Of Workflow
Similar to SDRs, Account Executives (AEs) can gain from automated workflows. With the right solution, AEs can automate tasks like scheduling meetings with potential clients and writing emails.
By doing this, you can free up time for your AEs to concentrate on higher-value tasks like establishing connections and closing deals.
Because automated workflows make sure leads are not overlooked or forgotten, they can also help AEs keep organized. By building straightforward yet efficient sales funnels, you may automate customized follow-ups to get customers on the phone. After that, you can create and test many iterations of your scripts for product demos, sales pitches, and other material.
Again, Copy.ai integrates with most other sales tools and your CRM. It can be integrated in 15 minutes or less with platforms like Pipedrive, Hubspot, and Salesforce without the need for any code.
With your CRMs and Sales Automation solutions, each member of your sales team may now develop customized sequences.
Marketing Teams
Many different types of activity can be referred to by the term “marketing,” such as:
Search engine optimization is known as SEO.
Email Marketing
utilizing social media for marketing
promotion of affiliates
marketing by word-of-mouth (WoM)
etc.
Still, driving traffic to your company’s website and converting visitors into new leads or paying customers is the fundamental objective of digital marketing.
Numerous techniques are frequently used to achieve this, with SEO acting as the main tactic.
After all, a business may consistently attract organic traffic by posting content that ranks highly on search engines like Google.
So how can digital marketers actually benefit from automated workflows? One example is SEO that is programmed.
Currently, the following laborious procedure needs to be followed by a content marketer who wants to rank an item on Google:
Choose the most effective keyword to aim for.
Choose more pertinent keywords to use in your writing.
Create a methodical synopsis that will be advantageous to Google and your readers.
Compose a well-informed and engaging essay (usually 1200–1500 words).
This article has been polished, revised, and posted.
Track rankings to get the most growth possible.
Thankfully, advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are helping marketers streamline almost every aspect of this.
The majority of SEO tools for beginners, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, and others, can assist you in determining the right term. Then, add that word to a pipeline by utilizing a tool like Copy.ai.
This will build an SEO-friendly article structure and automatically identify more crucial keywords for your content.
The first draft of each section of your material can then be written by Copy.ai. Utilize AI editing tools such as Grammarly to refine the final text to your preferences after making edits based on your own research and expertise.
Abruptly, the duration required to write and arrange blog posts could drop from hours to minutes.
This was one instance of how marketing processes could be automated with AI. Additional instances are:
For information on the best times to share your material on social media, use apps like as Lately or Emplifi.
Email marketing: Automate email sequences with action-based triggers.
Project management: To stay on task and keep your team moving forward, use software such as Monday.com or Asana.
Making landing pages: Copy.ai can help you make landing pages that convert well so you can collect emails, increase webinar attendance, make direct sales, and more.
Product descriptions: With Copy.ai, you can write summaries of each product in your eCommerce store in bulk.
Thanks to AI, content marketers and business owners can now focus more on the ideas that matter and less on the day-to-day operations.
What Benefits Can You Expect From AI Workflow Automation?
With AI workflow automation, you may achieve a great deal, but it all depends on what your team wants to do.
We’ll examine four particular use cases that can exponentially improve your sales and marketing processes:
Sales Emails with Personalization
SEO through programming
Product Details
Content for Leadership Thoughts
Personalized sales emails
Not always knowing which prospects to call is one of the hardest things for sales teams to deal with. Rather, the challenge lies in scheduling enough time during the day to produce as many leads as you can without getting tired.
And it’s a significant problem.
It’s no surprise that “nearly 90% of sellers feel burned out from work,” as the sales process is tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming.
This is especially true as more businesses use social media and email to compete for customers’ attention.
An SDR may engage in the following activities on a regular day:
Selecting the right channel or channels to interact with possible leads
identifying within those channels the appropriate leads to contact
crafting a message specifically for every possible lead
Creating and scheduling a list of follow-up emails
To reach quotas, all of this needs to be done as many times as feasible each day.
Monitoring participation and refining the procedure (messaging, channels, etc.)
Knowing that the most majority of their communications will be overlooked or unread
captivating. It’s true that to ensure the success of a cold outreach campaign, all of these steps are necessary.
However, most employees do not view this procedure as “fulfilling” their profession, and it lacks human ingenuity.
All of those tasks can be automatically completed using AI workflow automation.
With just one LinkedIn URL, Copy.ai creates a personalized cold outreach email based on the recipient’s profile:
Then, a follow-up email and a LinkedIn connection request will be issued (again, automatically) to further develop the relationship, depending on how this person responds to your messaging.
Additionally, each interaction is noted and stored in your CRM.
Your sales team could now begin pulling on various knobs to get the sales engine in your company going even harder than it did previously.
SEO Through Programming
It would be an understatement to suggest that there is too much competition in the SEO field. Every year, millions of new blogs are created. By 2022, there will be close to 500 million blogs on the internet, and that number is rising.
Businesses and content marketers are now faced with a challenging dilemma: how do you rank your content when there is competition for the same space on Google’s search engine results pages?
AI automation offers a strong and practical answer to this problem.
Think about being able to import a list of keywords into a Google Sheet-like application. The portions of your page or post that you have described can then be clicked on, and they have all been pre-written for you.
Are you not happy with the fundamental structure? With a few easy changes to the input, you can easily update the information.
Expand that process to process 500 keywords for pages or articles at once.
Copy.ai is enhancing the same workflow in this case. The goal is to help business owners and content marketers handle SEO strategically.
They might spend more time improving and honing content rather than getting mired in administrative duties.
Product Details
Writing product descriptions might sometimes feel like you’re balancing on a thin wire. In order for buyers to understand what they are buying, the descriptions must, on the one hand, be precise and educational. However, they have to be strong enough to persuade your visitors to act.
Oh, and all of your products must have these engrossing descriptions.
This explains why it’s common to come across subpar product descriptions on eCommerce websites. Marketing teams may not always have the time, energy, or resources to keep up with the amount of copy needed for each product, but it doesn’t mean they don’t want to create engaging content for their product sites.
An automated process for writing numerous product descriptions is available with Copy.ai:
These days, creating thorough and enticing product descriptions requires very little human involvement. Soon, all of your online products will be able to be instantly inserted into Copy.ai to generate these product descriptions in mass.
Rest assured, though; it won’t replace your internal copywriter.
Alternatively, you could hire actual marketers to run A/B tests on your product descriptions and iteratively improve your product pages until you get the right amount of conversions.
Creative Thinking
It will be harder to be a thought leader in 2023 than it was in the previous decade. In order to become recognized as an authority in your industry, you will probably require:
an active blog
a significant social media presence
authoritative content (ebooks, movies, lectures, etc.)
Even while this might not seem like much, the quantity of content needed can quickly stack up. For instance, as a thought leader, you could have to create:
There are two lengthy blog posts released each week.
There are five posts on LinkedIn each week.
There are twelve Instagram posts in a week.
Every day, four tweets
Every week, one YouTube video
There is one new eBook released every month.
Once more, that’s a lot of data. But there are a lot of manual processes that combine to take up your time.
With a service like Copy.ai, automated workflows allow you to finish all of the aforementioned chores in a single business day (truly).
Copy.ai helps thought leaders differentiate themselves in the digital crowd by producing engaging and helpful content. Right now, you can create all the thought leadership content you need, including:
Long-form, search engine-friendly blog posts
Postings on all social media networks
Video scripts
Electronic Books
As an alternative, you might provide your viewers with any other textual content.
But think about going a step further.
Think about the possibilities of having more thought leadership content ideas created for you based on a single blog post. A single topic could become an essay, tweetstorm, LinkedIn post, video script, and so forth, all of which could be shared across their respective networks with just a single click.
These are the exciting automations that we look forward to seeing, and these are the features that will soon be accessible.
Which Qualities Are Crucial For The Automation Of AI Processes?
The objectives that your team is working to accomplish define the qualities that are crucial for AI workflow automation.
Having said that, there are three qualities you ought to search for in whatever tool you choose to use.
1) It needs to be easy to use. When you’re learning a new tool, you don’t want to waste time looking through support documents and YouTube courses. Look for software that has an easy-to-understand user interface (UI) that any team member can grasp quickly.
2) It need to fall (on a scale) inside your means. As your firm grows, look at the price increases for each instrument. This will help you choose software that will help you achieve your long-term business goals.
Consider the price of each tool by considering the results you hope to achieve rather than the ones you now have.
3) It ought to work with other pieces of software. To solve the issues facing your business, select the fewest instruments that are practical and ensure that they complement one another. This enables you to create routines that automate the majority of laborious tasks.
Which Platforms Should I Use, One Or Multiple?
Your tech stack should ideally be as minimal as is practical. Moreover, different departments will probably need different AI platforms.
While your accounting team could need a solution like CashAnalytics, your customer support team might benefit from software like SupportLogic.
Two different issues demand two different answers.
There will be overlapping problems in your sales and marketing tech stack, therefore you should aim for the fewest tools feasible. Although there isn’t a single, perfect tech stack, try to minimize the amount of tools needed to complete a task.
For instance, you may automate almost all of the processes involved in your sales and marketing campaigns with the help of Copy.ai. You could:
Send new leads customized cold emails.
Compose and send follow-up emails in response to the user’s responses.
Add each interaction to your CRM.
Make a ton of blog posts that are optimized for search engines.
Based on the keyword you’re targeting, decide which additional keywords (or pages) you should rank for.
Repurpose whatever you post on social media.
Pitch link-building ideas to websites such as HARO (which will be live soon).
You should write hundreds of product descriptions for your web store.
The possibilities for what Copy.ai can automate are endless; these are just a few examples.
To be fair, you can design the same kinds of automated workflows using a variety of technologies.
For instance, Zapier enables you to link third-party apps to build complex software stacks. The problem is that your entire process suffers when one of these gadgets malfunctions.
To construct these systems yourself, however, would require a certain level of technological competence.
Once more, the precise objectives your team is trying to accomplish will dictate how many tools they need. Ultimately, though, you should pick a solution that allows you to accomplish your goals with the least amount of tooling.
When is the right time for my team to implement workflow automation using artificial intelligence?
Automation of AI workflows should be implemented as soon as practicable. Whatever the size of your business, the following advantages will become apparent right away:
The advantage of being able to move more quickly than larger competitors is enjoyed by small enterprises. Learn how to automate AI workflows early on and see how David can grow like Goliath with a small fraction of the resources.
Medium-Sized Businesses: Congratulations! You’ve overcome a challenge and now have a successful business. Elevate the situation without going over budget or wearing out your team.
Enterprise Businesses: You possess the financial means to employ experts to automate your AI operation. Locate the best candidate for the position and begin work immediately. There’s no reason to put it off because solving the issue won’t cost you much money.
Keep in mind that your rivals will leverage AI automation if you don’t. IBM recently published a study showing an increase in the number of businesses using AI to drive growth.
The following are the main conclusions of IBM’s study:
40% of the firms surveyed are looking into using AI as a solution, while 35% of them already employ AI in their operations.
According to 30% of IT experts, their organization uses AI automation to reduce labor costs.
The benefits of AI, including cost-effectiveness and efficiency, greater technical performance, and improved user experiences, were mentioned by about half of the firms surveyed.
DemandSage reports that 84% of businesses think AI will provide them a competitive edge and 83% say using AI internally is a top priority.
What makes this significant to you? Because AI causes growth—not just any growth, but enormous growth.
Your rivals will be able to take a bigger share of the market if they adopt AI more quickly than you.
That also suggests that it will be harder for you to catch up to your competitors.
Investigate the best AI systems for your business right now to avoid getting left behind or simply outclassed.
How Do I Choose The Best Software For Automating AI Workflows?
Depending on whatever department you wish to automate, selecting the finest AI-driven workflow automation software will vary, but the fundamental steps stay the same:
Take a look at your teams’ goals. Establish what your team’s ultimate objective is (generating more emails, directing attendees to a webinar, closing direct deals, etc.).
Draw a flowchart of your current workflow. Analyze the client journey from the moment they first engage with your company to the team’s ultimate goal. It is helpful to record every stage of the procedure in writing.
Look at the elements that require a lot of time and repetition. Ascertain which segments of your sales funnel can be mechanized.
Look into the best tools for automating such components. Once you’ve decided which features you need from AI workflow automation software, you may compare your options.
Find the solution that requires the fewest tools. Select the instrument that will help your team achieve its goals, both immediate and long-term.
This process will help you figure out what features AI software needs to have in order to automate particular workflows.