Artificial intelligence has transformed many key business processes for middle market companies
Key takeaways
With the vast potential of AI, determining where it can make the most impact can be challenging
Successfully mapping AI solutions to critical business needs often yields powerful results
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way that companies do business across all industries, transforming key processes and delivering increases in efficiency and business insight. But for many middle market organizations, the potential of AI can feel overwhelming, and determining where it can provide the biggest impact can be a challenge.
Below, our team provides a glimpse into many of the common use cases that can yield the most return on investment, strengthen your business operations and help you fully capitalize on AI’s vast capabilities.
Responding to proposal and grant requests
Companies generally need to present documentation to respond to questions to win work during the request for proposal (RFP) process, while nonprofit organizations and government entities have many avenues to receive grants to support ongoing operations. These processes take time, and the resources are not always available to respond to every valuable opportunity. Generative AI solutions can leverage historical data and user context to create high-quality responses to required questions with necessary governance in place. A system can create a draft before review and submission, enabling employees to dedicate more time to more critical tasks.
Gathering information for permits
Some industries, including real estate and construction, require a complex permitting process that can bring project progress to a halt. Generative AI can automate this traditionally time-intensive process, drastically decreasing the timeline to obtain permits and enabling more economic development.
Client spotlight
RSM recently worked with the City of Kelowna in British Columbia to create a solution for responding to potential grant opportunities to fund city projects, and another to facilitate the building permit process. With Grant Writing Assistant, Kelowna saves over 15 hours per week per team member and has captured millions of dollars in additional funding to lessen the tax burden on citizens. In addition, Building Permit AI Assistant established a friendly, chat-like experience that reduced the length of the permitting process from months to just days.
Performing campaign outreach
Organizations want an efficient and effective way to bring more attention to various campaigns, from marketing to fundraising. Internal users can facilitate customer data collection and feed it to an AI content generator which can produce the desired content. After human review, the AI application can then automate the distribution of outreach materials. With the extensive support available from AI, companies can reduce time spent generating content, enhance the quality of content, present a consistent voice and messaging, and increase success rates.
Predicting churn
All companies and organizations experience a certain amount of churn—or the rate at which customers or members stop doing business with them—but recognizing when and why that process begins can enhance retention efforts. By analyzing behaviors and demographics, AI tools can help predict who is most likely to churn and when it is likely to happen. AI delivers data analysis to help understand patterns, trends, anomalies and key factors of why people are leaving, and identify when to proactively reach out with timely messaging to keep them engaged.
Client spotlight
RSM created an AI solution for a nonprofit organization to understand the factors behind increased member churn. With a new tool that can quickly identify trends and correlations in customer demographics and member interactions, the client now proactively identifies members at risk of churning and plans intervention activities, resulting in increased member retention and revenue.
Detecting fraud
Reducing losses and shrinkage is a key effort for all businesses. Reducing loss can increase overall profitability. With AI tools, companies can leverage unsupervised and clustering learning techniques to quickly identify any outlier transactions in financial ledgers, payments, orders and more, and whether they are due to fraud, abuse or errors.
Scoring leads
To maximize success, companies must know where to focus their sales efforts. By analyzing behaviors and demographics, AI solutions can predict the likelihood of converting potential sales opportunities and determine the proper course of action given the buyer journey stage and customer characteristics.
Accessing advanced demand planning
Understanding which products and services will be in demand during certain time periods can help drive increased sales and customer satisfaction. AI can evaluate past sales, but also millions of external economic, demographic and industry-relevant data sources to generate a time series forecasting model to help proactively prepare for increased and decreased demand.
Providing valuable tax insights
As it has with many key business functions, AI has revolutionized the tax department. Integrated digital solutions with tax AI and machine learning capabilities can streamline tax functions that mitigate risk and yield valuable insights related to income, cash flow, costs and other variables. With AI, the tax department can contribute more to generating profits and reducing costs.
The takeaway
In many cases, the most critical part of AI adoption is knowing in advance what problems you want solved. Simply applying technology without a plan in place can lead to improper alignment with key business processes and a failure to deliver on the anticipated return on investment. But the right AI tools and strategies mapped to the most critical needs of the business can yield truly transformational results.
RSM contributors
Related solutions
RSM’s AI advisors have delivered innovative solutions that have inspired increased productivity and profits for organizations in several industries. Learn more about what our team can do for you.
