The AI revolution is here, and given its rapid rise in popularity, it's no surprise that it’s the talk of the business world. From marketing copy, memos, and reports to presentations and proposals, writing plays a key role in business but can be very time-consuming and as a result, costly. So, can AI make your business marketing easier and more affordable this year? Let’s dive in and take a look at the most common and useful applications of AI in business writing to find out.

According to Salesforce Research’s most recent State of Marketing Study, marketers’ use of AI soared from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020 due largely to Open AI’s Chat GPT, the leading AI writing platform. Attracting one million users in less than a week (consider for a moment that it took Twitter two years to meet this milestone), ChatGPT first made waves with intelligently generated outputs to simple text prompts. Now, the chatbot is regularly—and successfully—creating emails, ads, articles, and even code for businesses spanning nearly every industry. And with the recent release of ChatGPT Plus promising exclusive access during peak times and faster responses, how companies create content and ultimately staff their organizations is TBD, but it is looking more than promising.

It can be challenging to consistently generate quality content for clients consistently without burning out. AI writers can be useful, and who wouldn’t love a writing assistant with perfect grammar who has a virtually bottomless well of information and is always available? Well, look no further than the ever-popular writing AI wonder, Jasper. Formerly known as Jarvis, Jasper is among the AI writing software leaders trained by expert copywriters and has read a whopping “10% of the internet” to assist with writing high-converting copy for marketers, agencies, and entrepreneurs on a variety of topics complete with 52+ helpful templates to get started. This AI content generator also allows you to include additional information from your preferred tone to the character limit. Jasper also has an efficient assistant for writing long-form content, specifically with Power, Focus, and SEO modes, that allows you to optimize content for search engines through different templates.

A study by Harvard Business Review found that companies using AI for sales have increased their leads by more than 50%, reduced call time by 60-70%, and have seen 40-60% cost reductions. Needless to say, these tools are extremely valuable for day-to-day operations—take email campaigns, for example. While they’re an effective and arguably critical sales and marketing tool, sending out hundreds or even thousands of them, all while tracking performance, can be exhausting. But AI solutions like Levity monitor, categorize, and even file email responses for you. In addition to collating customer feedback, it can conduct competitor analysis market research and create SEO-friendly marketing material. When running outreach campaigns, an AI voice bot can contact thousands of individuals to present and sell your product offerings and can easily tackle direct questions or pass them on to a sales rep, allowing businesses to resolve issues promptly. And because AI tools like Levity can sift through a number of different conversations, companies can now detect the tone and purpose of incoming messages from customers through important crisis-prone words to better tag urgency and trigger faster actions. Yes, please.

All AI software uses machine learning to mimic human understanding and behavior to generate output based on user-given input. Since AI writing tools require a set of instructions provided by humans to work properly, over time, these assistants can effectively become “more intelligent” by using real-life data to make their output sound more human-like. This can greatly accelerate the content creation and marketing process, saving you time and allowing you to focus on other important tasks. But quantity isn’t everything. New advances in AI writing tools can identify grammatical errors, shorten overly long sentences, and even supply alternates for misspelled words while correcting formatting errors like punctuation—which means you can free up valuable time and resources without sacrificing quality.

Let’s consider some of the potential drawbacks of AI writing assistance. Distinguishing AI-generated content that is passed off by humans can be challenging, if not impossible, to discern, which presents some obvious ethical issues. And while there isn’t a formal body in place to regulate the use of AI, various algorithms and processes are being developed to determine AI-generated content. Tools such as Originality exist to detect AI-generated content, and Google is constantly evolving and tweaking new algorithms to address its downfalls. What does this mean for businesses? Putting out purely AI-generated content could be a big problem sooner rather than later.

From saving valuable time to optimizing productivity and enhancing the overall customer experience, it’s clear why businesses of all sizes are leveraging AI across their various departments and functions to generate content quickly. But because great writing requires thought and creativity that arguably, only real-life experience can inform, it may be a long time until it is advanced enough to fully replicate the skills and output that human writers bring to business. In the meantime, embracing AI writing tools and using them to draw inspiration, ideas, outlines, or even a second opinion, will help you stay up to speed on this changing technology and take advantage of its benefits when you may need it most.