The 11 Best AI Tools to Boost Your Business in 2024

Business leaders across market sizes, verticals, and growth stages are being pushed to use artificial intelligence. Your boss reads a message in their executive Slack community and now they’re asking about “our AI strategy.” Your new hire swears that they can use AI to finish their tasks in half the time. Whether or not you’re currently using AI tools, someone in your network absolutely is.

But with so much hype around AI, where should you search for new tools? Surely you can choose from one of the dozens of new AI startups entering the market, right?

Well, according to Dima Kovalenko, co-founder and CEO of Uptech, most of the newly minted generative AI startups entering the marketplace today are just “ChatGPT wrappers that bring null value regarding technological novelty or user flow.” (Ouch.)

To save you the headache of sifting through multiple Reddit threads and G2 reviews, we’ll list some of the best AI tools across use cases like sales, marketing, process automation, and more. We’ll also demonstrate a few innovative ways business leaders use artificial intelligence to add business value and save time within their companies. Let’s get started.

11 AI tools your business should know about

There are several major categories of AI tools that businesses should understand when evaluating solutions. Mastering the types of technologies available is the first step toward identifying high-impact use cases.

1. Video content creation: Colossyan

You’ve probably read your fair share of emails and social posts created with generative AI – but this technology can be used for so much more than writing text. With AI-powered video platforms like Colossyan, you can produce high-quality videos at scale for a virtually unlimited number of use cases.

Pros and key capabilities

Colossyan is a leader in AI-powered video creation, and its creator platform allows businesses to create high-quality videos at scale using AI.

For example, with text-to-video capabilities, Colossyan allows creators to automatically turn written content like slides, scripts, or articles into videos using customizable AI presenters. It’s really that simple. And if you have a global audience, you can easily meet their needs, too – Colossyan can auto-translate your videos into over 70 languages with a single click.

The Colossyan platform also allows you to choose from a variety of AI avatars and accents to personalize your video content. Or, if you need something really specific, you can even create custom presenters for your company or brand.

Once your videos are built, you can quickly export and publish them to meet a variety of use cases, including explainer videos, training modules, videos for marketing campaigns, town hall presentations, and digital signage.

2. General use: ChatGPT

We couldn’t create a list of AI tools without including ChatGPT. But aside from its popularity, what earns ChatGPT a spot on this list? Let’s take a closer look.

Pros and key capabilities

If you’re looking for a multi-purpose “Swiss Army knife” AI platform, ChatGPT is your best bet. Due to its accessibility directly via its application programming interface (API), you can leverage ChatGPT to build custom solutions that are tailored to your specific use cases. 

In other words, instead of investing in multiple niche AI tools, you can use ChatGPT and its handy text prompt features to build multiple, custom “GPTs” (generative pre-trained transformers) to meet your needs.

Some use cases where ChatGPT has added value include customer support, knowledge base management, process automation, and more. 

That said, the only downside to using ChatGPT instead of a custom solution is that you’ll likely be building these AI tools, or GPTs, yourself. Even if you do find a great GPT that meets your needs, it won’t come with the regular updates, priority support, and robust feature set that a standalone artificial intelligence tool provides.

3. Sales and lead generation: Salesloft

Noticed an influx of cold email spam lately? It’s probably the result of AI tools falling into the hands of business development representatives (BDRs) and sales development representatives (SDRs) with monthly quotas to hit. Don’t worry, we’re not blaming them. However, we do know there are several better ways to use AI tools for sales and lead generation. Which brings us to our next tool on this list: Salesloft.

Salesloft is a revenue operations platform that leverages AI to optimize the sales process from lead to close. It utilizes machine learning models that have been trained on vast datasets to provide actionable insights for sales teams.

Pros and key capabilities

One of Salesloft’s key capabilities is lead scoring, which qualifies prospects based on their behaviors and attributes. This helps sales reps prioritize their outreach to prospects and accounts that are most likely to convert. 

Then, once leads are in their system, Salesloft assists reps with the next best actions. Its AI recommends the optimal time, channel, and messaging tailored to each lead’s profile and stage in the sales funnel. This ensures reps spend time on activities proven to move their deals forward.

4. Marketing and customer engagement: HubSpot

Sales reps aren’t the only go-to-market professionals being pushed to adopt AI. These tools are also running rampant across the martech space as marketers continue trying to keep pace with increased growth targets.

Well, if you’re looking for an AI tool to help with marketing and customer engagement, we recommend HubSpot.

Pros and key capabilities

You may already know that HubSpot is an integrated customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, and sales platform, but one of its key AI capabilities includes predictive lead scoring to qualify prospects based on their attributes and behaviors. HubSpot’s AI studies the account attributes and behaviors of previous leads to make recommendations, helping marketers identify where, when, and how to engage leads and prospects.

HubSpot also comes with AI-powered search engine optimization (SEO) features through its content management system (CMS). By analyzing your on-site content and backlinks, it recommends SEO strategies to boost organic traffic to your site and improve user experience. 

Additionally, its marketing automation features utilize machine learning to personalize website experiences for new and returning visitors to your site; suggesting specific on-site content or sending personalized messages via chatbots are both good examples of this.

5. Meeting transcription: Otter.ai

Don’t want to take notes for every meeting? Neither do we. Regardless of what department you work in, AI transcription tools are a great way to quickly record, transcribe, and share meeting notes – whether you’re sending them to colleagues or saving them for future reference.

And if you’re looking for a meeting transcription tool, we recommend Otter.ai.

Pros and key capabilities

Otter.ai is a virtual AI assistant that can automatically record and transcribe audio files and meetings in real time. It utilizes speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to convert your audio to text so you can stop taking notes for good.

But Otter.ai does much more than act as a notetaker. Once you’ve recorded your meeting notes within the platform, you can easily search specific content within your completed transcript for reference. Even better, Otter.ai captures everything verbatim so you don’t have to worry about missing any crucial details that may have been missed otherwise.

In terms of accessibility, this tool integrates with common meeting platforms and CRMs such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Dropbox – giving you everything you need to store and share your meeting notes.

6. Customer support and chatbots: Intercom

As companies scale, customer support becomes more challenging. After all, your customer success managers, support agents, and service reps can only assist so many customers at once.

Naturally, this need to augment customer support led to the creation of AI-powered chatbots – but these tools come in varying degrees of quality. If you think AI chatbots could benefit customer support at your company, we recommend going with Intercom.

Pros and key capabilities

For customer support, Intercom uses natural language processing to understand your customers’ needs from previous chats and emails. Its predictive routing system then directs their inquiries and questions to specific agents with the highest probability of resolving them quickly. This is much faster (and less frustrating) than forcing your customers to choose menu options in a phone tree.

Intercom also provides chatbots powered by ML-based intent recognition and dialogue management. How can you use these bots, exactly? Well, common customer questions and inquiries can be handled automatically 24/7, freeing up your agents to focus on and resolve more complex queries that require their undivided time and attention. 

7. Process automation and efficiency: UiPath

Here’s a great tool for our enterprise readers. If you’re a startup or scaleup, chances are you’re still nailing down your processes and creating SOPs for standardized workflows. But if you’re a larger enterprise company, your goal is to optimize and streamline the processes you already have in place.

This is another use case where the power of AI really shines. If you’re looking for an AI tool to automate your existing processes and make them more efficient, we suggest UiPath.

Pros and key capabilities

UiPath is a leading robotic process automation (RPA) platform that utilizes various AI technologies to identify and automate repetitive tasks.

Some of UiPath’s key capabilities include cognitive automation, which uses computer vision and NLP technology to extract data from documents. In simpler terms, this allows you to automate tasks and processes that involve unstructured data, such as invoice processing, analyzing legal documents, or predicting employee turnover risks.

UiPath’s chatbots can also interact with users, guiding new employees through your existing workflows so you can spend less time and effort training them. In a nutshell, investing in an automation tool like UiPath is kind of like having a COO in your back pocket. As it automates more tasks, UiPath gathers insights to optimize your processes, prioritizes the effort involved in building these automations, and recommends new automation opportunities.

8. Omnichannel personalization: Dynamic Yield

Personalization is the key to getting the attention of your customers and prospects—but it’s not exactly scalable when you’re trying to create a personalized user experience for hundreds (or thousands) of customers at once. AI-powered omnichannel personalization tools like Dynamic Yield are making the impossible possible.

Pros and key capabilities

Dynamic Yield is an experience optimization platform that uses AI to create personalized customer interactions across channels. It collects customer data from various touchpoints (e.g., your website, customer emails, call center records) to build a unified customer profile that understands your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and attributes. Dynamic Yield then applies machine learning to analyze this data and personalize your messaging at scale.

Armed with these insights, the platform also tests multiple variations of your content, products, or user flows to surface the optimal experience for individual users in real time. Some of its key capabilities include AI-powered recommendations, dynamic product suggestions, and real-time campaign optimization.

9. Cybersecurity: Darktrace

With the influx of AI technology, hackers and bad actors are able to pose security threats at a greater scale than before. Fortunately, AI-powered cybersecurity platforms are also being developed to neutralize these new threats.

So if you’re looking for an enterprise-grade cybersecurity platform, we recommend Darktrace – a leading cybersecurity company that uses self-learning AI to detect and respond to cybersecurity threats across enterprise networks, cloud, SaaS, endpoints, and industrial environments.

Pros and key capabilities

The Darktrace Cyber AI Loop continuously monitors and analyzes digital activities to learn the “pattern of life” for all users, devices, and digital assets. It can even detect subtle anomalies indicating potential cyberattacks to stop threats in real time.

Why is this useful? Just like with your customer support teams, your security team has only so much bandwidth to constantly monitor, identify, and defend against potential security threats. But with a tool like Darktrace, you can monitor and identify potential threats 24/7.

The platform comes equipped with an Autonomous Response feature that allows AI to take automatic action to neutralize threats without human oversight, stopping incoming cybersecurity attacks within seconds. This platform is not only effective but also helpful in defending against internal threats as well; its Cloud AI Security protects your cloud workloads, containers, and serverless functions from both insider risks and external threats.

And if you need tools to identify potential threats, Darktrace can do that, too. The platform’s Darktrace Antigena feature detects and investigates zero-day threats across email, SaaS applications, and cloud environments without relying on signatures or rules.

10. Data analysis: Tableau

Data analysis is another use case that AI can easily tackle. Instead of manually sifting and sorting through large datasets, AI-powered platforms like Tableau make it easy to analyze endless columns of data and extract meaningful insights.

Pros and key capabilities

Tableau is a leading visual analytics platform that leverages AI and machine learning throughout the data exploration and storytelling process.

Some of its key AI-powered capabilities include “Ask Data,” a feature that lets users interact with data intuitively using plain English. 

But what if you’re not sure what you’re looking for and don’t know what to type? In that instance, Tableau’s automated recommendations engine can suggest relevant charts, dashboards, and analyses based on the dataset you’ve provided. 

Additionally, Tableau uses AI to prepare and cleanse data. Its automated data preparation tool recommends steps to profile, enrich, and transform datasets so users can interpret them with minimal effort.

11. Predictive analytics: DataRobot

We all wish we could predict the future. And while that’s not really possible, you can get pretty close with AI-powered predictive analytics technology. With platforms like DataRobot, you can build AI models to assess historical data, discover patterns, observe current trends, and use that information to predict future trends.

Pros and key capabilities

DataRobot is a leader in AI for predictive analytics, allowing businesses to build, deploy, and manage predictive models at scale using automated machine learning (AutoML).

For starters, DataRobot streamlines the predictive modeling process with powerful AutoML capabilities. This allows even non-technical teams to develop accurate predictive models quickly and easily. 

Then, your teams can use these models across a wide range of tasks, including credit risk modeling, customer churn prediction, price optimization, fraud detection, and more. 

DataRobot also focuses on transparency to help its users understand why a model generated a specific prediction. This model explainability gives users confidence in the models and their ability to support important business and operational tasks.

Unexpected ways AI can improve productivity

While automation is AI’s most recognizable benefit, some of its most impactful applications go far beyond streamlining repetitive tasks. AI also acts as a powerful decision-making aid when tackling complex challenges – especially in corporate environments where the stakes are high.

AI provides a valuable “second opinion” in specialized fields. For example, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center uses AI to review CT scans and flag areas for a radiologist to examine closer. In other words, if medical professionals trust AI to give feedback, your teams can trust AI to identify and resolve business problems within your organization.

Business leaders would also be wise to think beyond automation alone when brainstorming potential AI use cases. What high-impact or time-consuming decisions could AI inform? Where can it best be utilized to assist your human teams? Approaching AI as a problem-solving partner rather than a process-automating tool will help you open the door to new forms of productivity.

Leverage AI video creation tools with Colossyan

You don’t need every tool listed above to successfully optimize your business’s performance. But one tool on this list can impact every part of your business: Colossyan. With AI-powered video creation, you can quickly spin up interactive product explainers, onboarding videos, organization-wide training modules, presentations for every meeting and department, and so much more. 

Want to start creating high-quality videos at scale? Book a demo with our team to get started.