Last month I was at an in-person event and I overheard someone saying, “we need to leverage AI across our entire customer journey,” while their partner was frantically scribbling notes, clearly trying to figure out what that actually meant in practice. They looked like they were about to cry.
After the session, she asked me, “My boss wants us to ‘do AI,’ but I don’t even know where to start. Do I need to use it for everything? Just some things? How do I know?”
Here’s what I told her (and what I’m telling you): You don’t need to boil the ocean. You just need to understand that generative AI does seven basic things. That’s it. Seven use cases that cover pretty much everything you’ve been hearing about. Once you know what those are, you can stop drowning in vague directives and start making actual decisions about where AI fits into your workflow.
Let me break it down.