Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, even Apple included ‘Apple Intelligence’ in their iPhone 16 release (whether we want it or not). While 2023 was characterized by AI awareness and hype, 2024 ushered in experimentation and deployments for businesses and individuals. This article examines the top AI use cases of 2024.
At the start of the year, the allure of AI’s potential prompted many organizations to consider wholesale implementations of AI across various functions, some with success and some with failure. This enthusiasm was often driven by board mandates or the fear of missing out (FOMO). Regardless of the trigger, the year has been fraught with mixed results because of the one crucial fact we keep overlooking: AI is a tool to augment human capabilities, not the other way around.
How AI is Being Deployed
This Forbes article, underscores this point and the importance of mitigating intellectual atrophy as we continue to adopt more technology in our every day lives. Successful AI integration hinges on understanding then leveraging its core strengths – scale and speed – to amplify, accelerate, and expedite time consuming and non-thought provoking tasks for us. At the start we took a wholesale approach to AI – it can solve everything for us. Luckily, reality set in and we discovered it can’t do everything. Furthermore, there were concerns around hallucinations and lack of transparency, but innovative entities like Perplexity.AI are providing an alternative to search by pioneering transparent AI by – providing users transparency into the data sources used in its AI response back to you (unlike ChatGPT). This approach, which I term ‘Conscious Capitalism,’ aims to increase the adoption of AI, while building credibility and ensure there’s a Human In The Loop (Chapter 6 of this book), echoing President Reagan’s maxim, “Trust, but verify.”
The following 15 use cases exemplifies this balanced approach, showcasing AI as a tool to accelerate human outputs. Listed below are the top AI use cases for 2024.
The Top 15 AI Use Cases of 2024
- Search & Research – an alternative AI search engine, Perplexity.AI, is available to use with the ability to read the source of data.
- CV Enhancement – This Forbes article provides a ‘how to’ guide on how to best leverage AI for job searches, interviews, and CV enhancement.
- Grammar – fix grammar and spelling beyond your classic ‘spell-check’.
- Excel Mentor – discover easy formulas, easy calculations, learn macros and perform data analysis without having to hire a data analyst.
- High-Level (not High-Touch) Customer Service – use agents and bots to answer fixed Q&A.
- Blog Writing – create drafts for your blog.
- Cold Email & Replies – create tailored emails to maximize response rates.
- Digital Marketing & Monitoring – get suggestions on campaigns and ways to measure results.
- SEO Optimization – identify keywords to embed into your search engine optimization strategy.
- Viral Hooks & Content Creation – create drafts for content to be posted on a variety of social channels.
- Sales Advisor & Cohort Identification – perform data analysis to discover new customer cohorts and their buying patterns, while finding ways to up-sell to existing customer segments.
- Data Processing & Analytics – use AI tools to do basic data analysis functions.
- Social Media Engagement – manage impressions, clicks, reposts, retweets, comments, and more.
- Digital Content Creation – create mood boards and drafts for digital content.
- Virtual Assistant Bot – use bots to book tickets, make reservations, manage your calendar and emails.
As we approach the end of 2024, an analysis of the ‘Top 15 AI Use Cases’ reveals a noteworthy trend: the use cases that are the most popular are focused on task-oriented activities that are traditionally time-intensive, rather than complex problem to solve. They act as force multipliers, allowing us to allocate time more efficiently towards higher -value activities that require judgment and creativity. These use cases are also characterized by their low-risk nature.
As the growing trend in adoption is emerging, the use of AI appears to be grounded in the creation of personalized ‘AI Agents’. Tailored digital assistants, for us to leverage, poised to revolutionize our approach to time-consuming yet essential tasks. By offloading routine, labor-intensive processes to these ‘AI Agents’ we’re ushering in a new era of personal productivity and not to off-load or delegate work that requires critical thinking The key to leverage AI is knowing when to use AI!
