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For countless industries, businesses, and leaders, AI is revealing unlikely opportunities for growth.
In business, decision-making is an increasingly complex process. Leaders must recognize artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool not solely for automation, but for discovering patterns and opportunities. Across industries, organizations are deploying agentic solutions to work faster and see further.
Freeing Up Resources
“Quality over quantity,” Watt Advertising co-founder and CEO Chelann Watt stated. “I don’t think there’s going to be room for much in between.”
From her vantage, Watt was witnessing real-time market divergence. Some choose to automate every process, compromising quality, and others automate specifics, maximizing quality. In an industry as dependent on human connection as advertising, this choice could make all the difference.
“By automating the very minuscule, we’re constantly addressing: where can we automate the manual work to where you, as the team member, all of a sudden become the quality control agent?” Watt said.
She continued, “It frees up more resources to give to my team to focus on the human element.”
Improving Day-to-Day Life
For Recallify co-founder Berkan Sensen, AI is the tool that maps demand. His platform is designed for those with neurological conditions, and his analytics tools reveal where solutions are needed.
“There is… a great opportunity to democratize access to AI,” Sensen said, “to help support people in their day-to-day lives.”
“We have built-in internal pipelines to see which queries are bringing people to our site,” he elaborated.
By analyzing search patterns, Recallify discovered high engagement from the multiple sclerosis community and the EdTech sector, insights that led to an Innovate UK grant and advanced the platform’s service capabilities.
Still, Sensen is aware of AI’s limitations and how certain strategies could harm growth. “All of us get relentless non-stop AI slop messages,” he said. “It takes our brains just three seconds to realize, ‘I’m not going to read this.’”
Eliminating the Need for a Middleman
Relocating a business isn’t easy, but PayDirt CRM founder Tex Kelley found a solution in AI. “You can basically build out anything,” he said. “As long as you’re telling it exactly what you want.”
Discovering that he could use AI to build better, cheaper systems became a philosophy. “We find out where the big platforms get their services from,” Kelley explained. “If there’s features or build-outs that we really like and we’re already subscribed to, and we want to pull it all in-house, we’ll start the process; cutting out the middleman and passing real savings to our clients.”
PayDirt CRM’s model of finding better, cheaper systems was well-suited to AI. Now, the platform builds quality solutions quickly with direct, affordable integrations. “We treat your business as if it’s our own,” Kelley concluded. “We know it works.”
Improving Understanding
“People use AI tools badly,” Disaster Avoidance Experts CEO Dr. Gleb Tsipursky asserted. “They send along bad content that undermines performance.”
For years, Dr. Tsipursky has studied cognitive biases; he believes AI adoption is riddled with them. “In order to solve that problem,” he continued, “you need to teach people how to use AI effectively and have them build their own tools.”
Most employees don’t understand how AI actually works, assuming output will be accurate and functional. When staff build and refine their own tools, however, they develop both ownership and critical judgment. Thus, individual AI gains scale across teams, and users understand the strengths and weaknesses.
“And even if something happens to the company,” Dr. Tsipursky said, “they’ll still have that portfolio of AI tools they created.”
Changing Customer Support
ClearBlue Ionizer founder and president Mike Assad didn’t expect AI to transform his customer support channels, but when he deployed an agent, as he said, “The light went on.”
“I was blown away by how many requests we were getting,” Assad shared. “I had no idea customers had these questions. Every time I get a chat transcript where it doesn’t know the answer, I feed that answer back into the brain. It just constantly gets better and better every day.”
ClearBlue Ionizer produces mineral ionizer systems to reduce pool chlorine to safe drinking-water levels. Even for such a specialized business, AI has been able to impact operations. “It’s basically free,” Assad said, “and you’re getting this real-time intelligence from your customers on a daily basis. It’s insane.”
AI as a Business Advantage
For companies like those above, the greatest advantage of AI might be its ability to surface what leaders couldn’t see: markets, costs, and customer needs. Still, intentionality is essential. Without clear, human values at the core, AI strategies will compromise on quality instead of reshaping decision-making.
