They’re the two letters heard around the world: AI. And it’s about to change everything.
When OpenAI announced the release of its language model ChatGPT in November 2022, it was not only the tech industry that took note. Professionals from marketing and sales to law and finance began ideating ways AI could aid — or, concerning to many, do — their jobs.
According to HubSpot’s data, 57% of business professionals agree that the impact AI will have on human productivity will rival the Industrial Revolution.
Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, likens this moment to another landmark of the past, saying: “This is too big to ignore, I think it’s the single largest opportunity and biggest tech paradigm shift we’ve seen since the internet originally came out.”
While experts agree that AI will undoubtedly change nearly everything, we broke down how it might innovate specific industries in the coming years.
And we checked in with the people on the ground: HubSpot surveyed 13.5k+ US business professionals in March 2023 to more deeply understand how AI is changing the business landscape.
Read on for original data, expert insights, and analysis on the ways AI will change the world:
1. Content
As a language model, ChatGPT’s primary use case is, well, language. It’s designed to generate humanlike responses to queries and has been trained on massive amounts of data from across the internet.
There’s also an ever-growing army of AI-powered chatbots built specifically for writing: Rytr, Jasper AI, Copy.ai, Copysmith, and Writesonic, to name a few.
These chatbots help business builders and employees with common writing-related projects, from blog posts and intro paragraphs to social media captions, scripts, and emails.
As Zapier CMO Kieran Flanagan said on his podcast Marketing Against the Grain, “Content is going to get better in terms of AI being able to create content, repurpose content, and localize content. [AI] is going to be your best content assistant.”
With each new writing technology released, it begs the question: How will this change how we produce content?
One of the first to answer this question was media company BuzzFeed, which quickly announced it would use ChatGPT to create some of its content. CNET also tried, and ultimately failed, to publish AI-generated content.
While AI can help massively with outlining a first draft or defeating writer’s block, it’s less likely to be putting journalists out of work anytime soon.
But it could be a great thing for creators: 34% of business professionals strongly agree and 39% somewhat agree that AI tools can help them spend more time on the creative aspects of their jobs.
2. Search
With all the comparisons to the invention of the internet, there’s no doubt that AI will change the way we search for information and answer questions.
Rather than typing a query into a browser’s search bar, users will likely enter it into an AI-powered bot that can provide them with a singular, simplified response.
Microsoft and Google have been racing to be the most effective AI search option — with Microsoft announcing Bing and Google unveiling Bard.
The idea behind these AI engines is that they won’t only spit out links to relevant articles, but will also generate content such as grocery lists, vacation itineraries, or meal plans.
According to HubSpot data, 55% of business professionals strongly agree that, by 2024, most people will use chatbots like ChatGPT to answer their questions over search engines like Google.
This will, of course, have ramifications for businesses that rely on SEO content, and marketers and content creators will have to learn how to make content that can survive in the new search landscape.
Search-driven content will remain important, but businesses will need to work with AI, not against it.
“I think Google is going to answer more queries… I just don’t see [AI] really disrupting everything,” entrepreneur Neil Patel said on a recent episode of Marketing Against the Grain. “Google will figure out how to monetize, and I do think this type of model will actually cause us to use search more.”
3. Programming
Copy is’t the only thing AI can write — it can also help programmers by creating, troubleshooting, and completing code.
Tools like DeepCode, Tabnine, CodeWP, and OpenAI’s own Codex, among many others, can assist those who want to write code more easily in many coding languages.
Many AI models simply suggest your next line of code, much like the autocomplete function in Google Docs. This could help beginners learn to code more effectively and translate between coding languages if needed.
And it’s effective: A Deloitte pilot study using Codex found that the majority of users rated the code’s accuracy as 65% or better.
Shah is bullish on AI’s ability to help with programming, saying in a recent episode of My First Million that the most exciting AI use case in his opinion “is the ability to go from text to code.”
Why is this so exciting? Because it means that the limits to creativity will be blown away. Complex coding problems or minuscule mistakes will no longer stand in the way of inventors who want to dream up big, new code-based products.
Entrepreneur Shaan Puri notes how low the barrier to entry will become for those interested in building with code: “Do you know how to speak? And do you know what you want? That will become all you need.”
4. Marketing
HubSpot’s survey data makes one thing clear: Marketers are not only ready for AI to change their industry, they’re already using it in their day-to-day operations. Some noteworthy numbers:
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53% of marketers report using chatbots in their roles (ChatGPT, Bing AI, Google Bard)
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44% use visual AI tools (DALL-E, Synthesia)
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44% of marketers use text-generation tools (Copy.ai, Compose AI)
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48% report using generative AI for market research, finding data sets, and summarizing articles
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45% use AI for content creation and data analysis/reporting
And, arguably the most important stat, 79% of marketers believe generative AI can improve the quality of marketing content they create.
The marketing sector, which touches on everything from graphic design and illustration to copywriting, data analysis, and reporting, could be significantly improved with the help of AI. And change is already afoot.
“In the last year, 15B words were written using AI assistance in Jasper alone. Do you have any idea how many words are in all of the English language articles on Wikipedia? It’s 4B,” VP of Jasper AI Meghan Keaney Anderson said on a recent episode of Marketing Against the Grain.
“Productivity and the act of creating builds upon itself. Whenever you have this moment when something releases all the barriers on creation, you get this period of massive productivity and massive creation.”
With marketers able to reallocate reclaimed time from tedious tasks to ambitious, highly creative projects, there’s one thing to keep in mind: It’s not as simple as letting AI generators take the wheel.
“You get a lot of junk,” Keaney Anderson says of AI’s outputs. “Our role now is to figure out how [to] use it in a way where we don’t just put junk out on the internet, but [reinvest] the time that we get back.”
5. Customer Service
Intelligent chatbots have already served as the first line of defense for ecommerce brands and will continue to do so, likely growing even smarter.
AI-powered customer service agents solve multiple problems for businesses: They require fewer frontline employees, reducing labor costs and allowing for 24/7 customer support.
For business leaders, the customer service space is ripe for AI disruption, and 71% strongly agree AI/automation tools can help improve customers’ overall experience with their companies, according to HubSpot data.
Additionally, 64% strongly agree AI/automation tools can help them understand their customers better.
While it may seem like humans would offer a more personal interaction, AI actually allows for a hyper-personalized user experience by using data to quickly learn about customers and their preferences.
Most importantly, AI can use predictive analytics to turn past data into better future customer service experiences, making every customer interaction a valuable learning tool.
Flanagan considers this is one of the most promising use cases for AI.
“Support is one of the most obvious places where you can start to have a much better experience with AI…” he says. “In an AI world, support is live 24/7.”
6. Health Care
There’s arguably no more important industry than health care, making the AI innovation in this space particularly exciting. From curing diseases to lowering the chances of misdiagnosis, AI will likely play a pivotal part of the health care system in the near future.
There are many AI health care companies already racing to solve for the industry’s many problems and pain points: Butterfly Network is making handheld, AI-powered ultrasounds, Cleerly’s platform provides 3D heart scans, and Enlitic is making a smarter radiology workflow, among countless others.
One of the most exciting applications of AI in health care is in the research and development of new drugs. Companies such as Healx aim to save time and money developing new drugs by instead analyzing millions of drug and disease data points to find existing drugs that could be used to treat rare diseases.
AI will not only lead to technological innovations but could also help alleviate the shortage of health care professionals by assuming tedious, time-consuming tasks that don’t require specialized skill sets.
But the health care industry is highly regulated and historically resistant to change, making any AI implementation a difficult task.
“In order to have mass adoption of the technology, you need it to provide 10x value compared to the current system,” XRHealth founder and CEO Eran Orr says of VR and AI in health care. “Not just slightly better because people resist change.”
The other challenge: patients. A recent report shows that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable with their doctor relying on AI for their own health care.
While the idea of an AI-powered health care system may seem scary at present, people already see the many benefits AI could bring, with 51% saying AI would help mitigate racial and ethnic biases in health care.
“I believe we’ll get to that tipping point,” says Orr, “but it will take another decade.”
7. Finance
Like health care, another highly regulated industry that might be slower to embrace AI is finance. As an industry that works with large sums of computable data, it could benefit the most from AI-powered tools.
Fraud detection is an area in which companies are already offering AI solutions, as algorithms are able to analyze massive amounts of data to more effectively detect fraud as it happens. This could potentially protect both customers and financial institutions from falling victim to scams.
AI could also take some of the guesswork out of risk assessment, help financial traders make more informed decisions, and analyze borrower data more effectively to make loan decisions.
Some startups working on those solutions include:
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Feedzai, an AI-powered fraud detection service
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DataRobot, a risk mitigation tool
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Two Sigma is a quantitative hedge fund that employs AI
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Zest AI uses AI to make better lending decisions
On the customer service side, AI allows banks to analyze customer data and provide more personalized advice, products, and services to deliver a customized experience, even as fewer people step inside physical banks.
As AI innovation continues, we might be moving into a world where those who work in industries like finance are actually more comfortable when their tools rely on AI. Of surveyed business leaders, 52% reported that it’s important that they use software at work with AI/automation capabilities.
Though, for a highly regulated industry such as finance, AI will likely never take full responsibility for sensitive customer information or transactions, and 76% of business professionals agree that people should avoid being overly reliant on AI and automation.
And Many More...
These are just some of the many industries that will be revolutionized with the use of AI — it will soon be easier to count industries not touched by this technological revolution.
Some noteworthy additions: law, art and design, human resources, education, and manufacturing, to name a few. There’s also an increasingly large pool of unique applications.
While no new technology is perfect — AI will have its flaws and even introduce new problems to solve — many agree that this is the most noteworthy tech advancement since the internet itself.
Buckle up — it’s going to be an amazing, automated ride.
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