The idea they came in with

Clients often have pre-existing ideas and AI projects in mind before we ever start the AI Audit process, especially when they are excited about the opportunity and investment they are making. In our interview process it is important that we understand and pick up these ideas early, as they often help us to understand what the company’s main goals are. However, sometimes they have little to do with AI, or aim at the wrong problem altogether, which we have to point out honestly in the Audit report. Whilst working with a national trade association on their AI Audit recently, we came across exactly this.

What they asked for

The national trade association we are working with runs a successful newsletter, and is already very lean in operations, which means naturally their main business goals are on the side of growth. Their idea revolved around increasing the size of the sales funnel, with AI added to it. After some digging, working to understand what they had in mind, it became clear that they were ideating a solution which was for the most part regular email marketing, with some hints of AI in between the steps.

What we did with it

We delved deep into their process of prospecting, to gain a stronger understanding of where along their process the bottleneck was. We found that the limiting factor was not in fact the scale of the email outreach, rather the amount of time it took to research each prospect prior to reaching out to them. So their idea, mostly email marketing with AI at the edges, was aimed at the wrong step: sending more emails faster would not have touched the real bottleneck. In the report for the parts that were email marketing we pointed them to popular tools like Apollo, mainly to speed up the process of making lists of potential prospects. In the end the client said yes and agreed to go ahead with setting up two other AI projects, including one which speeds up the research behind each prospect.