How to Create Your Own AI Business Assistant – Beyond ChatGPT

Building an AI business assistant enables organizations to operate and perform their tasks more efficiently and in much less time. The latest research reveals that 70% of business executives indicated their workers take an hour or more to look for one piece of information.

Moreover, a survey conducted by Gartner showed that 47% of digital workers could not locate the information or data to perform their tasks efficiently.

These statistics reveal a problem in organizations that AI business assistants can solve by managing tasks and enhancing the search for information.

AI business assistants are gradually becoming indispensable in today’s workplace as they assist the workforce in handling their work more efficiently.

Let’s understand what these AI business assistants are and how to build them.

What are AI Business Assistants?

AI business assistants are artificial intelligence programs by which one can manage many business operations. These assistants employ sophisticated natural language processing to enable users to communicate with them more freely.

AI business assistants can take care of many tasks, such as coordinating a meeting, dealing with e-mails, a to-do list, and responding quickly to a query. They operate actively to facilitate your business processes; improving with each interaction that is held. These assistants can interact with many tools and applications so they can finish work in various systems.

The AI business assistants enable employees to dedicate their time to dealing with significantly essential tasks, resulting in higher organizational efficiency. More companies are becoming dependent on data, and thus, the use of AI assistants to manage and search for data becomes more important.

What Roles can AI Business Assistants Play?

AI business assistants can play several crucial roles in an organizational setup:

1. Administrative Tasks

There are certain routine activities like conducting meetings, managing calendars and emails that can be taken care of by AI assistants. These mundane tasks can be managed through automation, which makes it possible for the employees to save much time and contain the chances of making mistakes. This is even more important given that 70% of business leaders have reported that employees spend an hour or more trying to find one piece of information.

2. Data Management

These assistants are particularly effective when it comes to data organization. They can search, store, and display the information for the employees, thus enabling them to access the data they need easily. This helps to address the issue stated by Gartner: 47% of digital workers could not locate the information or data that is needed to get a job done.

3. Customer Service

AI business assistants can take charge of customer inquiries and support tickets and ensure they are addressed with efficiency and preciseness. This aids in maintaining regular and effective communication with the customers, hence increasing customer satisfaction.

4. Decision Support

AI assistants are also capable of interpreting logical results that can be helpful in decision-making. They can be of immense use in analyzing patterns, preparing reports, and making suggestions from facts. This is important because more than a fifth of enterprise leaders (23%) revealed that they spend more than 5 hours per piece of information.

Example Use Cases

• Marketing Department: An AI assistant can handle the marketing campaigns, customer insights, and communication with the prospect.

• Human Resources: AI chatbot for HR can be used to manage employees during recruitment, organize interviews, and keep service records.

• Sales: Using AI, sales leads can be followed, necessary emails can be sent at regular intervals, and sales reports can be created.

Thus, AI business assistants ultimately lessen organizational burdens, enhance effectiveness, and enable workers to concentrate on higher-level and creative responsibilities.

Here is How to Build Custom AI Business Assistant?

The process of developing an AI business assistant starts from the following:

1. Selecting the Right Tools for the AI Initiative

The first step is choosing proper tools and media. LLMs like GPT-4 from OpenAI, Claud.ai from Google, and Cohere are ideal to use as generative AI since they have high performance capabilities. They are robust and can comprehend and produce text that is nearly indistinguishable from a human’s language, which is suitable for developing AI companions.

2. Define Your Assistant’s Role

Determine which tasks should be delegated to your assistant. This could involve organizing calendars, responding to emails, or pulling information. If the role is clarified it becomes easier to set the right expectations since they will indicate the required scope of custom chatbot development.

3. Data Collection and Data Preparation

For you to teach your AI assistant, you will have to feed it with relevant information. These may be emails, documents, schedules and other communications relating to business matters. Make sure that the data is good and organized.

If you’re partnering with a Generative AI development company to build the AI business assistant for you, make sure to communicate the data format you have. They’ll assist you in formatting the data and making it usable for the business assistant.

4. Train the model

Train your assistant on the collected data using the LLM you picked. This entails training the model on the specific language used in the business and the terms associated with your business. It is advised to fine-tune the model using APIs such as OpenAI’s API.

Recently, we’ve helped one of our clients train an AI assistant for insurance knowledge. You can read about how we built it here – Insurance AI Portfolio

5. Connect with Your Business Applications

Connect your AI assistant with all the applications and systems you interact with daily. These can be email marketing tools, calendar apps, CRM systems, and others. Connectors and APIs are available for these tools to support integration between them.

However, being an AI software development company, we’ve seen that businesses that don’t have dedicated AI development teams struggle to integrate AI business assistants with their existing business tools. So, if you’re among them, consider going with the best Generative AI development company.

Also Read: How to Build AI Chatbot Like Replika?

Off the Shelf vs Custom AI Business Assistant

When implementing AI business assistants, organizations have two primary options: off-the-shelf and custom-built systems. Both options have their benefits and drawbacks; however, to achieve maximum utilization and fine-tuning, custom AI business assistants offer unique benefits for companies.

Let’s confirm this argument with a brief description and pros and cons of both the options:

Off-the-Shelf AI Business Assistants

Pre-built products like those offered by Zowie and Atlassian are convenient because they can be implemented immediately into a business. These solutions are expected to be universal with the flexibility to integrate with many organizations and sectors.

Advantages:

• Quick Deployment: These solutions can be deployed quickly and can be implemented in organizations within a short duration.

• Cost-Effective: Generally, off-the-shelf AI business assistants are cheaper when installed than if they were to design and implement systems from the ground up.

• Proven Functionality: The large customer base of these systems has meant that they have been thoroughly tried and tested for their dependability and efficiency.

Limitations:

• Limited Customization: Such solutions can be generic and can lack some features required for exact business or its processes, which can mean some critical function misses.

• Scalability Issues: The enterprises and mid-scale businesses we work with have realized that off-the-shelf solutions are not ideal for their specific and increasing needs.

• Dependency on Vendor: Off-the-shelf solutions rely on the vendor for update, support and customization, which may prove to be constraining and expensive in the long run.

Custom AI Business Assistants

Specific to an organization’s needs, a custom-built AI virtual assistant for business is a unique solution crafted and implemented for specific business needs. This way, businesses can build a solution that is fully compatible with their business processes, data processing, and long-term plans.

Advantages:

• Tailored Functionality: Business-specific custom AI assistants are designed to directly meet business requirements and seamlessly integrate with existing systems.

• Enhanced Scalability: These solutions can be built to be scalable and capable of accommodating any changes that the business might encounter in future.

• Competitive Advantage: By creating something entirely new, companies can gain a competitive advantage by having different skill sets and high efficiency levels.

• Data Ownership and Control: Custom solutions provide maximum control over data, keeping all the necessary information within the company and away from potential third-party threats.

The only disadvantage of custom AI business assistants is that the upfront cost is high as compared to SaaS-based off-the-shelf solutions. However, the cost for custom AI business assistants in the long run goes low as the enterprises don’t have to pay monthly/annually subscription fees.

Ending Note

Developing an AI business assistant is not a mere process of selecting from a set of available solutions. It involves evaluating and identifying your organization’s requirements and then incorporating state-of-the-art AI into it.

While training an in-house employee to become an AI expert may look like a costly endeavor at first glimpse, the time and money saved, increased productivity, improved handling of data, and a competitive advantage underlines the cost-efficiency of a customized AI assistant.

If you’re looking to build an AI business assistant for your organization, Biz4Group can help you. We’ve been building Generative AI assistants since the technology took place and know which LLMs would work the best for you.

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