If you are running a profitable, growing business, get ready for the AI shot in the arm.  AI will give your business a 10x boost in five to seven years. Here’s how:

Let's say your business generates $10 million of revenue today, on a path to $20 million in the next few years.  Adopting AI will propel your trajectory by 10x, i.e., to $200 million in the same time frame. This is an aggressive prediction, but it is not baseless. Looking at every significant technological transformation in history, the businesses that adopt and embrace the new paradigm outcompete their peers by orders of magnitude.

When personal computers just arrived (PC-age), businesses adopting this new way to streamline operations became much larger. FedEx is a great example of an early PC adopter. Similarly, Netflix killed its existing business to embrace the internet age entirely and became one of the largest media companies in the world. Many other lesser-known businesses adopted PC technology to increase revenue and profit margins dramatically. Today, AI presents a similar opportunity but much larger.  AI is the most significant technological shift we have ever seen.

While some of the nimble early adopters survived and in many cases grew exponentially, other businesses faced early extinction just for being too slow or too rigid. Pan Am, Woolworth, Blockbuster, Radioshack, and Sears are at the other end of that spectrum, and lost for being too slow or unwilling to change. For example, Kodak, which was one of the largest companies globally and a monopoly in the photography industry, died a sudden death when camera-equipped mobile phones became popular. This pattern has played out repeatedly in a similar fashion, every time we are faced with a transformative technology.  So as a business, how are you looking at this new paradigm, AI?

But is AI ready for enterprises and businesses?

Two years ago, when generative AI, or more specifically Chatgpt, arrived on the scene, it fundamentally changed how people interacted with computers or smartphones. An entirely new set of commands and requests emerged that we  never imagined making to computers. There was now a single interface where you could ask for instructions to learn crochet, or write that dreaded resignation email. The use cases are mind-boggling; ask your kids :).  Businesses have also begun to adopt GenAI in many interesting ways, albeit cautiously. It has been a mixed bag of results for them, in general.

Many businesses are in design-partner or trial stage, and haven’t jumped onto the new paradigm completely yet. Other than figuring out the best use case and the right tool, there has been an issue of reliability when it comes to deploying AI in enterprise settings.

If there was one word that transcended the medical realm and attained a pop culture status in the past 2 years, it has to be “Hallucination”. Everyone is aware of this limitation of LLMs and business more so. That is also one of the reasons that the adoption from businesses in general has been slow and cautious and hence we haven't seen many success stories where businesses have made a significant gain or progress using this new AI technology.

However things are beginning to change now. Very slowly but quite strongly.

AI Transformation has begun

From our experience of the past 1 year of deploying Agentic AI, starting with pilots and now fully live systems, we are beginning to see some amazing business success stories in companies who are early adopters and spending time and rethinking their existing businesses in the new paradigm. These are the companies who have aligned their vision with the new future and decided to not be left behind.

It is starting out in a small way in a sub-sub-section of a business function (the way it should be) then spreading out. We are seeing this playing out in a similar fashion and quite successfully in practically every business we are working with. As I explained earlier, our history tells us that the businesses that are going to be the early adopters, stand to have significant leverage over the others who are slow and lagging. They will be the winners & leaders. This has been the case in practically every large paradigm shift in our history.

​This transformation may feel like a feature which seems optional right now but very soon, will be your key to existence.​

Of course there is going to be resistance internally and from outside but that's the nature of change, it is hard. This transformation may feel like a feature which seems optional right now but very soon, will be your key to existence.  Embracing it and moving forward is the only option if you want to even survive because your competition is busy preparing itself with the new technology for the new future.

So what can a business do today?

Since you ask, we would say - start with a “Champion”. This person is going to be the Agent-Of-Change for your company. Since you are the one reading this right now, it can even be you, why not? Companies will need someone inside who is willing to rethink the status quo in this new paradigm and perhaps empowered with the role of exploring options towards that goal. If you become the champion and your initiatives drive that 5x/10x/100x growth, imagine what it does for you. I will leave you with your imagination, there.

Once you have a champion, start with the lowest hanging fruit - identify a small unit of workflow in any of your business functions, that is either not addressed well or not addressed at all. For eg, If you have leads coming into your website or a landing page but the time to get back to them is in days and not minutes, then that might be a good use case to think of AI automation of some kind. Or another example would be to pick an RNR (Ringing, No Response) list from your CRMs. These are usually overlooked subset but as a marketer you know that people don’t usually pick phones easily these days, especially from the unknown number. So taking up this list and implementing an AI outreach plan could be a safe bet. Or you could look at your social channels or onboarding flows or something else. The idea is to pick small and simpler use cases that you can clearly measure the outcome for and evaluate success of the project fairly accurately.

Build it inhouse or buy the best out there?

This depends on the use case mostly, but our recommendation would be to work with the best out there, always! At least while you are figuring out what is working and what's not. Building a good product / solution takes a lot of time and not to mention dedicated and concentrated effort over a long period of time. It will be hard to beat the output of a team who is fully focused on a certain problem for years vs having a small internal make-shift team multiplexing on the project along with other things on their plate. We have seen multiple times that internal projects start with a lot of enthusiasm but fizzle out before touching the finish line. Sure you didn’t invest any additional money on it but the most valuable thing that you lose is time. Losing 3 or 6 months has a tremendous opportunity cost.


Solution-as-a-Service

While buying a pre-built solution makes a lot of sense, it is equally important to note that a generalized saas-type product may not be the best way to go about this. The offered software might be very well built and might have a ton of features but may not be able to meet your needs fully and hence wouldn’t extract the full potential from the given use case. So it is extremely important to choose a solution which offers a lot of customizability and fits well into your existing stack at least to a high degree if not 100%. The new breed of offering here is coming to be known as solution-as-a-service. Where the providing vendor would focus on the solution to your problem rather than selling a software for you to figure out is best use.

Guardrails and Reliability

Data security and arresting hallucinations is another big criteria for the selection. In the current state of LLMs, it is very similar to putting a lasso on a very difficult horse. You sure can try and you might even get lucky but you may also end up wasting a lot of time with poor results. AI application companies who have spent years with these LLMs understand this and have built layers on top of LLMs to manage this. Like at Zigment, we have built a proprietary orchestration layer that handles the output from LLMs to manage micro tasks along with the guardrails to ensure accurate output only.

Native AI

I also empathize with the fact that buying decisions isn’t easy at all. In fact, it is more difficult than selling. While there is no easy hack to come up with the best choice, one thing that we recommend to our prospective customers is to understand whether the company (with AI in their name or tag line) has AI as a feature or is truly building with AI at their core. For eg, a company that one of our customers was considering had AI automation for their drip email flows. But the AI part in this case was only restricted to being able to generate email body and subject lines via a chatGPT like interface.

I am not suggesting that the above example is outright bad and the degree of AI in your AI tool doesn't necessarily determine a successful business outcome however, I do not think that a superficial use of AI will create a 10x impact that we are discussing here. For the larger impact, we will need to go a little deeper and build on the use cases that are somewhat critical to your business.

About Zigment

At Zigment we are working with a number of companies who have decided to lead the change instead of watching it pass by. Zigment offers a platform to implement Agentic AI to automate end-end customer journeys for businesses. At Zigment we do this by customizing the AI agents for the specific workflows in your customer journey funnel. We work in a solution-as-a-service model where our engineers build and deploy the entire solution and also supervise the overall functioning of the system.

Book an exploratory call with us today to understand how Agentic AI can help you achieve your 10x growth.  Drop an email at 10xsales@zigment.ai