How To Use AI & Automation To Create Super Efficient Businesses

One of the most significant strategies for business cost savings today, often referred to as “business arbitrage,” is leveraging artificial intelligence to handle repetitive tasks. This approach utilizes the efficiency and consistency of AI to streamline operations and reduce expenses, allowing businesses to focus their human resources on more strategic activities.

Remote → AI

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a notable business trend involved hiring remote workers from countries with lower costs of living. Companies, particularly in Singapore, often sourced talent from Indonesia and Vietnam. This strategy allowed businesses to incorporate skilled labor into their workflows while minimizing expenses.

Platforms like Slack made work communication easy. Remote workers are useful for process-oriented tasks that do not require intense in-person brainstorming - tasks typically managed by founders or local leaders directly. One of our business partners just built a business off this concept, called Worknetics, who help startups run global remote teams and we had first-hand insight on what worked well and what didn’t.

In recent years, AI technology has advanced tremendously, reaching a level where it can outperform humans in specific tasks.

This will only accelerate. This headline just came out today: Jan 20 2025 “OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, to announce AI super-agents capable of performing tasks at a PhD level, per Axios.” It is slightly worrying for a subset of people who can have their years of dedicated expertise provided by an AI bot. Eventually, AI & AI agents are able to replace a good portion of desk bound work with managers controlling these agents. It will be a matter of time before we get this right.

Use Cases

When applied correctly, AI tools can handle certain functions more effectively than humans by being more consistent, available 24/7, and often producing higher quality outputs.

Here are some common workflows where you, as a business, can leverage AI today if you have not done so:

Content Generation - AI can create social media posts, generate images, and craft concise marketing messages. Tools like MidJourney can produce high-quality images that enhance the meaning of your marketing content. Additionally, AI can maintain your company’s branding style and tone, ensuring consistency across all content.

Automated Email Campaigns - Using marketing automation platforms like Mailchimp, businesses can design automated email campaigns to onboard and nurture leads over time. Effective email sequences, such as those used by Dyson, engage customers post-purchase, making them feel valued and excited without resorting to repetitive spam.

Customer Relationship Management Tools - AI-powered CRM tools help manage client relationships, provide shared access across teams, handle billing, and forecast future sales. These tools streamline client management processes, allowing teams to focus on growth and customer satisfaction.

Customer Service Chatbots - Platforms like Intercom utilize AI-trained chatbots to handle customer inquiries. These bots can triage questions, manage issue tickets, and escalate complex problems to human operators when necessary, ensuring efficient and effective customer service.

ChatGPT

A quick way to begin integrating AI is by using a general purpose AI chatbot. Chatbots offer a natural interface that mimics human conversation, making them user-friendly and effective. Here are some popular options:

• ChatGPT is known for its excellent UX and being the original standard model

• DeepSeek - very competitive model to GPT-4o and with its web search functionality

• Perplexity - focuses on search-related tasks

• Claude - offers superior models but has a less user-friendly interface, often accessed via API

AI excels at understanding, summarizing, and drafting documents. Instead of searching for templates online, AI can generate customized drafts of corporate letters and documents based on specific contexts. Additionally, AI can help explain long-form documents, ensuring that no critical information is missed and that complex documents are understood quickly and thoroughly.

Tools like Zapier enable businesses to create “if this, then that” automations, streamlining repetitive tasks without extensive manual intervention. For more specialized needs, custom triggers and workflows can be developed to further enhance operational efficiency.

Modern software developers increasingly rely on AI to assist in writing code. AI tools reduce the emphasis on memorizing syntax, allowing developers to focus more on code logic and business requirements. Experienced developers can leverage AI to produce and translate code across different language stacks, diminishing the need to specialize in a single programming language.

Activate AI for Your Business

Latent offers AI Automation Services for startups and established companies. For a reasonable fee, you get a fixed scope solution delivered in 1 week to automate your most urgent business task.

At face value, AI does not replace the employee but gives existing employees leveraged tools and knowledge to do the work of one or more traditional employees.

If used properly, the future of AI optimized businesses will run at higher margins with smaller teams and generate more revenue per headcount for sure.