Last week, I spoke with a tech entrepreneur about AI and its potential to make software companies, among others, more efficient in the future. What will happen when many of the functions done manually today become semi-automated? Let’s take a look at a few ideas.
- Software Development: With “Copilot” type software from GitHub and other new tools entering the market, software developer productivity has increased dramatically. While there will always be a need for software developers and a demand for more software, these productivity gains mean we can amplify the output of existing talent, perhaps making them ten times more productive.
- Quality Assurance (QA) and DevOps: QA usually involves a mix of manual human testing and automated tests. Imagine an AI bot that observes real product usage, generalizes user activities, and then automates those tasks. Such AI can also introduce its tests based on usage patterns as well as random guesses. We will still need a QA department, but human roles would shift towards managing and coordinating AI.
- Customer Support: Think about all the trouble tickets, support calls, message boards, and routine check-ins related to offering a superior customer experience. With AI, we might be able to handle 70-95% of these experiences through natural language processing, ensuring correct and accurate responses. Humans will still be essential for edge cases, quality control, and providing feedback to AI. Still, from a productivity perspective, we can support customers much more efficiently.
- Sales and Marketing: On the marketing side, AI with large language models can generate content with a specific tone, style, and voice. This content can be utilized for email templates, landing pages, websites, and social media campaigns. In sales, AI can draft email templates for outbound activities, produce content for slides, and customize presentations for potential clients or requests for proposal. While human involvement remains crucial, AI can reduce the labor intensity of these tasks significantly.
- Back Office Functions: Consider areas like finance, HR, and operations. We’ll see AI enhancements in collections, bookkeeping, controller functions, and financial planning and analysis. AI will also play a role in talent recruitment, applicant tracking systems, and candidate evaluation. All these sectors will benefit from AI-driven improvements.
Taking all these factors together, one must wonder about the efficiency gains for a software company. Will it be 20% cheaper or even 50% less costly to run a software company? This will undoubtedly impact the costs, scalability, and efficiency of running a business. Will it lead to the creation of more software companies or result in more mergers and acquisitions? Will the market competition offset these efficiency gains?
The exciting aspect of technology and considering the future is that these advancements are inevitable. From the perspective of software companies, using AI to enhance business operations, not just the products they offer, will be an intriguing area of innovation over the next decade.
Entrepreneur
via https://www.aiupnow.com
David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
