Get More From the AI Your Business Already Pays For

Your Business Already Pays for AI. How Much Is It Actually Doing?

If your company pays for Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft 365 Copilot, it’s worth looking closely at what those subscriptions can do for your business.

Rewriting emails and brainstorming ideas are useful starting points. But they represent a small portion of the available capabilities.

These tools can help with substantial business work: analyzing spreadsheets and creating charts, creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and working with information across Microsoft 365 applications.

The capabilities available to your team depend on the product, subscription, and company settings. Your next impactful improvement could already be within reach.

Before buying another tool, explore what you’re already paying for.

The possibilities stretch across the business. Here are a few illustrative use cases to consider:

• Sales: Turn discovery notes, customer requirements, and an approved template into a proposal draft for your team to review.

• Operations: Compare supplier quotes, organize differences in pricing and scope, and flag missing information for follow-up.

• Business reporting: Explore sales or expense data, identify patterns, and create charts that help your team understand what changed.

• Team knowledge: Turn an experienced employee’s notes into procedures, checklists, and training materials.

• Customer service: Group customer feedback into recurring themes and draft responses using approved company guidance.

• Management: Bring project updates together into a briefing that highlights progress, blockers, and decisions requiring attention.

These are possibilities to test, rather than promises of results. They’re also just a starting point. The range of useful applications grows when you bring your own documents, templates, data, and business context into the work.

One recurring task can involve several connected uses: reviewing information, comparing options, drafting a recommendation, and preparing a presentation. That creates opportunities to improve an entire process.

Start by reviewing the AI subscriptions your company has. Identify who has access, which capabilities are available, and how people currently use them.

Then choose one task your team does regularly. Give the tool clear instructions, relevant source material, and an example of a good result. Define who will review the output and what information is approved for use.

Test it on real work. Measure the time required, including corrections and review. Check whether the finished result meets your standards.

When an approach works, save the instructions and examples so others can repeat it. A useful experiment becomes more valuable when the whole team can apply it.

You don’t need to explore every capability at once, but you do need a clear picture of what’s available and where it could help.

Build Lean’s AI workshops help teams connect the tools they already use to their actual business workflows.

Start with the subscriptions you have, find one meaningful use case, and build from there.