12 Ways to Leverage AI in 2024, Part 2
In Part 1, we began to answer the question, “How does one actually use AI?” AI, like the internet, is not one thing. It’s a collection of tools and technologies that can impact nearly every area of our leadership and lives.
Based on hundreds of hours of research, speaking on, helping others, and my own experimentation, I’ve condensed 12 Ways to Leverage AI in 2024.
Part 1 examined the first six ways to use AI effectively. Today, we’ll explore the final six.
Above: AI can be used as a collaborative set of tools to help individuals, leaders, and organizations be more effective, productive, and innovative. See Part 1 for the first six ways to leverage AI.
Artificial Intelligence represents one of the most powerful technologies ever created and the most significant innovation since the advent of the internet.
It’s also as complex and varied as the internet, so I’ve dedicated myself to helping leaders understand, capitalize on, and make good use of AI tools.
Let’s start with what I think could be one of AI's most helpful impacts for you individually – AI as a personal assistant.
7. PERSONAL ADMIN
Increasing personal productivity, effectiveness, and resourcefulness by helping with tasks.
Consider how AI tools can help you with daily tasks such as taking notes, transcribing audio, drafting messages, managing calendars, setting reminders, generating ideas, translating content, and automating tasks.
Let’s unpack a few of these.
Notetaking and Transcription
For note-taking and transcription, I use Fireflies.ai. You can invite Fireflies to online meetings or upload audio and video files to create transcriptions.
Transcriptions are helpful, but where a tool like Fireflies really shines is in the AI-generated summaries it produces – a summary of what was discussed, a list of action items, and even an outline of the meeting, all with links to the verbatim discussion.
I’ll even record just myself to process ideas, create a list of things I’m working on, or workshop an upcoming talk or Wave Report. I find it a helpful way to clarify my thinking. See an example below.
Above: AI-notetaking and transcription tools like Fireflies.ai or Otter.ai can help create meeting summaries, capture action items, take notes, and more.
As an aside, I do not record most of my meetings for a few reasons. First, it isn’t helpful to have transcriptions of everything I talk about on a given day. That’s too much information!
Second, depending on the meeting, recording can change the social dynamic of a meeting and inhibit what people are willing to share. If I do want to record, I always ask for permission.
Last, I’m always conscious of what kind of private or proprietary data goes into any AI tool. It’s important to understand the terms of service for the tools you use (for example, can they use your data to train their model?) and then consider that when you use the tool.
Personally, I don’t mind my copy or speech being used to train AI, but I am careful with certain types of private data.
If you want to try Fireflies for transcription and note-taking, use our referral link to get 10% off their plans.
Drafting Messages
We’ll discuss copywriting later in this Wave Report, but occasionally, I find it helpful to have AI help me with an email response or a note I’m sending to someone.
Tools like Grammarly offer the ability to help draft replies to emails. It can summarize the sender’s intent and suggest different ways to respond.
Above: Tools like Grammarly can help draft email responses. This can provide a quick starting point for what you want to say.
If you are interested in Grammarly, you can use our referral link to get one month free (note that we also get a month free if you use this link).
Truthfully, I use the email writing feature less often than a tool like ChatGPT to help write notes. I might write a prompt like “Help me write a note of appreciation to [person],” including details about why I appreciate them and what they’ve done. Then, I can take what I like and leave the rest. Sometimes, it sparks an idea for something I wasn’t considering before.
There are more ways to leverage AI as a personal assistant to cover in one Wave Report, but here’s a list of other ways you might leverage AI in 2024 for both personal and professional use:
Calendar Management: Scheduling meetings, sending reminders, and organizing events.
Proofreading and Editing: Quickly review and improve written communications.
Email Management: Sorting, replying, and prioritizing emails.
Social Media Management: Curating and scheduling social media posts.
Notetaking and Transcriptions: Records, transcribe, summarize, and capture.
Language Translation: Real-time translation.
Idea Generation and Brainstorming: Generating a wide range of ideas and concepts.
Task Automation: Automating repetitive tasks like data entry.
Customer Service Support: Assisting in managing customer queries and responses.
Appointment Reminders: Sending reminders for appointments and meetings.
Content Recommendations: Suggesting movies, books, and music based on preferences.
Travel Planning: Booking flights and hotels, creating itineraries, and transportation.
Health and Fitness Coaching: Providing personalized workout and diet plans.
Educational Tutor: Assisting in learning new skills or languages.
Cooking and Nutrition Advice: Recipe suggestions and dietary planning.
News and Information Updates: Providing customized news summaries.
Microsoft Copilot is vying to become the all-in-one productivity-oriented AI assistant. I’m interested in what they are doing, and while I’ve only used Copilot’s search features, if Microsoft is successful, it will make platforms like Microsoft 365 very tempting. (And that’s saying something for a Mac+Google guy!)
Above: Major players like Microsoft and Google are vying to build the ultimate AI-enabled personal productivity platforms.
💡 Takeaway: AI can help with tasks and increase personal productivity, effectiveness, and resourcefulness. Find what works for you, and don’t worry about the rest!
While the benefits of AI as a personal assistant are just beginning, it promises similar benefits for the enterprise in the form of automation. Let’s look at that next.
8. AUTOMATION
Automation of key business processes, routine tasks, and triggered business activities, including communications.
AI tools can help automate key processes and routine tasks in several areas.
Marketing Automation
Many email and automation platforms offer the ability to increasingly trigger communications based on certain behaviors and criteria.
Most people are familiar with basic automations like a welcome email series to new donors or customers. But what if you took advantage of technology to automate a series of messages when someone visits a specific page of your website, abandons a cart or donation checkout, or exhibits behavior that indicates they may be at risk of lapsing?
Above: Marketing automation enables a more personalized customer experience by tailoring communications to the individual, triggered via a behavior, criteria, or scoring algorithms that detect patterns such as lack of engagement, perceived interest, or any of a number of other factors. See “What is Marketing Automation” by Shailesh Pandey for a primer.
If you are new to using marketing automation, the first step is automating around significant moments in your user journey – did they just sign up, make a purchase, or give a gift? What does that onboarding journey look like? Then, you can move on to more truly AI-powered automations like I described above.
Marketing automation is powered by software, usually some combination of donor/customer database (CRM) and email marketing platform. Popular examples include Hubspot, Salesforce, MailChimp, and Adobe Marketo – there are dozens of quality platforms that help enable marketing automation.
Data Entry
There are ways to facilitate data entry, from finance and accounting to impact measurement, if not fully automate it.
While there are very sophisticated data entry systems, for a simple personal example, if I have a physical document from which I want to capture data without re-entering, I just take a picture with my phone and use smart text detection to copy the text.
Above: AI-enabled text detection can speed up the data entry process.
There are many other uses of automation in data entry. For example, in accounting software, AI is often utilized to auto-categorize transactions based on past transactions of a similar type. Consider automation in these areas in 2024:
Data entry
Triggered communications
Processing
Digital asset management
Tagging
💡 Takeaway: Consider how AI-powered tools can help you automate or facilitate key business processes or trigger communications based on specific actions or behaviors.
Let’s now look at how AI is transforming automated customer service from a source of frustration into a powerful and positive customer experience.
9. CUSTOMER SERVICE
Improve, automate, and scale interactions with donors and customers, providing instant responses and improving customer satisfaction.
We’ve all had frustrating experiences with automated customer service tools, whether getting lost in a phone tree (“I just want to talk to an agent!”) or chatting with a hopelessly simple-minded bot who only seems to know the answers to three questions.
However, with the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models and Generative AI, AI's natural language ability has vastly improved.
Now, AI-powered chat tools can be customized with your data, enabling organizations to create custom chat agents.
Imagine uploading your support documentation and transcripts from a hundred customer service interactions with human agents to a tool like Chatnode, which can create a custom customer service agent with knowledge that closely matches or even exceeds what anyone can know.
Above: AI-powered customer support tools like ChatNode.ai or Zapier’s AI Chatbot enable organizations to create custom chatbots.
I worked with a nonprofit client a couple of years ago, who, thanks to a chatbot, was able to assist people seeking services, automating over 18,000 interactions over the course of a couple of months. More than 95% of sessions were resolved without needing a staff member to intervene, and the remaining were handed off for a human agent to handle.
The organization estimated that the chatbot had covered the work of the equivalent of 5-6 staff members – staff members they didn’t have and couldn’t hire fast enough. The chat agent saved them money, scaled more quickly than they could have through traditional staffing and training, and, most importantly, created a positive experience for users.
💡 Takeaway: Custom chatbot agents can help do the work of many customer service agents, saving money and enabling customer and donor service departments to scale during times of need. They can also go beyond simple FAQs and customer support issues to provide training support, point people to content, and leverage an organization's collective knowledge to help users.
Much has been said about Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to generate natural-sounding copy. Next, let’s look at how AI-based copywriting tools can help when paired with the skill and discernment of a human writer.
10. Copywriting
Based on input, AI can help generate creative and compelling copy for communications, ads, letters, phone scripts, website content, and social media posts, saving time and inspiring new ideas.
I recently listened to an interview that Bill Gates did with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Gate’s podcast Unconfuse Me. When talking about how difficult it has proven to build AI-enabled robots, Altman reflected on how we used to think that AI would first impact blue-collar jobs in the form of factories and production (robots), then white-collar jobs in the form of knowledge work (math and science), but we could hardly imagine the creative field being impacted heavily by AI, if ever.
The irony is that the reality has been precisely the opposite. Robots have proven very difficult to build, while LLMs like Copy.ai, ChatGPT, and Claude can be powerful copywriting collaborators.
The human element is important here. Without the guidance of a human to offer quality prompts and be responsible for the final output, AI copy is prone to sounding natural, but often without saying anything or even being nonsensical and off-topic.
In my opinion, we’re a long way from letting AI write copy that organizations would use untouched and unedited. More often than not, AI copywriting tools help generate ideas and blocks of copy that can be incorporated or edited into the final product.
In the spirit of experimentation for nonprofit fundraisers, here’s an example prompt to feed into your LLM of choice.
Example Fundraising Appeal Prompt
Help me write a fundraising email appeal for (Organization Name). Use an appreciative tone. Each (Offer Dollar Amount) donated (Describe the Impact). Our mission is as follows: (Mission of the Organization).
💡 Takeaway: AI-based LLMs can be great collaborative partners for generating ideas and different approaches for content, but a human touch is still important to create compelling, interesting, and persuasive content.
The other side of the creative coin from copywriting is design. Let’s look at how AI tools can be leveraged in 2024 to assist on the visual side of things.
11. DESIGN
Design visuals that help inspire creators with layout, typography, color schemes, and imagery, quickly generating different options and combinations.
In my experience, AI-based tools for design are further behind those for copywriting, but there are still several powerful ways to use AI to help inspire and assist the creative design process.
Image Generation
Text-to-image tools like Open AI’s DALL-E are often the most associated with AI design tools.
For example, the cover image for this two-part series was created using the prompt “Create an image based on the idea of leveraging a new technology to do things that no human was previously capable of doing, in a Renaissance style, and make the output 16x9.”
Above: An image generated by DALL-E based on a prompt to create an image conveying humans leveraging new technology in a Renaissance style.
While AI-powered image generation can be fun and helpful in some situations, I wouldn’t exactly call it practical. That’s where design tools come in.
AI for Design
Design programs like Canva increasingly utilize AI to help creators visualize design ideas, creating a starting point for the human creator.
Here’s an example from the Canva website based on the prompt:
Above: Design platforms like Canva’s Magic Design enable creators to create many different variations of designs and layouts as a starting point.
Beyond design for simple images and layouts, AI tools can also be used for presentations.
AI for Presentations
There are AI-based tools for creating presentations based on content, including SlidesAI, Beautiful.ai, and Gamma.
Here’s an example presentation that I generated in Gamma last year as an experiment after giving it a one-page outline:
Above: An example AI-generated presentation based on a one-page outline uploaded to Gamma.
Increasingly, conventional presentation tools like PowerPoint are also including AI-powered features.
The other day, my 10-year-old showed me in PowerPoint how she created the text and image she wanted in a slide, and the software generated more than a dozen different layouts, including different photo and text treatments. She chose the one she liked and modified it from there. Let’s just say when I was ten years old, my school presentations never looked so good!
💡 Takeaway: AI tools can help creators generate images, visualize different layouts and treatments, and create a starting point for visualizing ideas and content.
Our final topic is an area where AI capability is still emerging – analyzing data and trends.
12. ANALYSIS
AI to quickly analyze large datasets to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies, providing valuable insights for decision-making.
Of all the areas where I expect AI to be further along than it is, that is the area of AI-based analysis tools. While AI is incredibly powerful for detecting patterns that no human could detect, it’s comparatively terrible at explaining those patterns in ways humans can understand and act on.
In some cases, the fact that the machine can’t explain the patterns is fine. For example, in Part 1, we talked about how AI can use large amounts of data to help improve audience Targeting (#5 Targeting) and Segmentation (#6 Segmentation). It doesn’t matter whether I know how AI came to target specific individuals as long as the results are there.
But AI also promises to help leaders make better decisions by surfacing insights, and in that area, AI needs to get better at explaining itself.
Data visualization and analysis platforms like Tableau are increasingly incorporating AI capabilities. Tableau AI promises to help leaders do three things: 1) tell data stories, 2) discover the “why” behind insights, and 3) make transparent predictions and recommendations.
Above: Data analysis platforms like Tableau promise to leverage AI to tell stories with data, create deeper understanding, and make predictions and recommendations.
💡 Takeaway: Increasingly, AI tools will help uncover insights, better understand trends, and make predictions and recommendations to equip leaders to make smarter decisions.
Your Homework, Part 2
In Part 1, I encouraged you to choose one of the ways to leverage AI I’ve outlined in this Wave Report and play with it. Did you do it? I'm not judging you – I probably thought about trying ChatGPT a dozen times before I logged on, created an account, and actually tried it. Remember, the only way to learn is to try.
There is no new homework. For Part 2, your homework is the same – choose one area you are most intrigued by, and give it a try!
Until next week… Surfs Up! 🌊
- Dave
About the Author | Dave Raley
Consultant, speaker, and writer Dave Raley is the founder of Imago Consulting, a firm that helps non-profits and businesses create profitable growth through sustainable innovation. He’s the author of a weekly trendspotting report called The Wave Report, and the co-founder of the Purpose & Profit Podcast — a show about the ideas at the intersection of nonprofit causes and for-profit brands.
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