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November 22, 2023
Mieke Houbrechts
Generative AI is taking the world by storm. Learn how smart SaaS companies like yours can power their applications with AI, and change how they build product.
A new star is rising. Its name? Generative AI. The rise of new AI tools is shaking up every industry, especially the tech and SaaS markets. So, what is generative AI and why is it so powerful? Let's dig in.
Generative AI or generative artificial intelligence is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new, original content that mimics patterns it has learned from training data and different algorithms. With generative AI, you can create any type of content: text, images, video, music,… even code! It is also a very useful tool for streamlining event planning processes.
Imagine a rock band with a drummer, a lead guitarist, a bass guitarist, and a singer. They’ve been playing together for years and have released over 200 songs. A new pianist, a lifelong fan who knows the band’s unique style and rhythm, joins the band.
The pianist creates new melodies that perfectly fit the band’s style, even though the band has never played songs with a pianist before. With years of training just from listening to the band’s songs, they are able to create something unique, yet familiar.
Just like the pianist has trained himself for years on a set of songs, you can train a generative AI model on whichever datasets you want. As a result, it will create a unique, high-quality piece of content based on what it has heard or seen before. You can then fine-tune it and make it your own.
When we talk about AI nowadays, ChatGPT by OpenAI is the first thing that comes to mind. It has taken the world by storm, becoming the 7th most used software application by businesses. So you may wonder, is ChatGPT an example of generative AI or a generative pre-trained transformer?
ChatGPT is an example of a generative AI tool based on GANs (generative adversarial networks). It is currently based on GPT-4 (generative pre-trained transformer 4). When OpenAI was launched, it was based on GPT-3, which was vastly improved since then.
It is an AI language model, which means it generates text like other large language models (LLMs). No images, diagrams, or visual content. The unique thing about ChatGPT is that it’s conversational and gives you text-based replies in real-time.
The more questions you ask and the more context you provide, the better your answer will get. For example, you can use it for content creation for social media or to flesh out the first version of a new landing page.
Here are some other use cases for ChatGPT and similar AI systems:
Although ChatGPT is wildly popular, you'll find examples of generative AI everywhere, as well as other generative models based on natural language processing.
Our prompt in Dall-E: "A developer creating charts and graphs on a computer in pixel art"
Generative AI has become the talk of the town. But why so suddenly? With many breakthroughs in tech fields like machine learning and deep learning, new AI technologies quickly learned to make sense of complicated data like never before.
And the sudden interest in these technologies is not entirely surprising. Simply put, using generative AI tools comes with many benefits provided you’re familiar with the basics of prompt engineering.
AI can do a lot of work quickly, especially with lots of training data. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) products generate billions of data points, making generative AI attractive to the industry. Not only to speed up internal operations but also to build more impactful products.
Tools like ChatGPT are a blessing for your SaaS teams. AI tools can automate their repetitive tasks and save hours of time and resources. Employees can now invest those precious hours in more complex, strategic tasks to make a bigger impact.
For example, in marketing and customer success, AI can analyze customer feedback data to understand what customers want. Customers will get more personalized service, and become more loyal as a result.
In HR, AI can make hiring easier and help understand how employees are doing.
Likewise, product managers can use AI to speed up product cycles and build more impactful products.
Many product builders are investigating how to build AI capabilities into their apps. AI can make SaaS apps smarter by giving users helpful tips, making processes more efficient and less error-prone.
These examples barely scratch the surface of what AI can do. The possibilities are virtually endless!
AI has many use cases in the software industry that can benefit both your business and your customers. In a keynote talk at Data Talks, Dado Van Peteghem showed some of the many useful ways to use AI in your SaaS tools. Dado is an expert in innovation and AI and these ideas are based on use cases from real life.
Here are a few of them to get you inspired. If you want access to the full talk, download the recordings here.
Long gone are the days when chatbots gave rudimentary answers to your customers, causing more frustration than benefits. With a tool such as Chatbase, you can add your own database and sources and teach the bot to respond and give direct responses to your customers.
This means that with a little bit of time spent up front, your own personal chatbot can become a product expert. You can save time and money so your customer support and customer success team deal with only the most important inquiries.
Have a video you want translated for a larger audience? HeyGen is about to blow your mind.
Simply upload a video, choose the language you want to translate to and the tool will clone your voice to that language. That way, you can appear like you’re speaking French even if you’ve never spoken a word in your life.
This tech is ideal if you have product onboarding videos and you want them to be available to a global audience. At a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to shoot, translate, and edit multiple videos, you can have amazing videos in a variety of different languages.
Small tasks can take up significant portions of our workday. One such task is taking notes during meetings and luckily, AI can help here too. There are various tools such as Fireflies that sit in as “participants” in meetings and take notes, transcribing what the different participants are saying.
But this feature is nothing new. What is new is the ability to take those meeting notes and summarize them into short notes and sentences. Participants can get key takeaways without forgetting what the meeting was about. At the same time, people who didn’t participate can get a bird’s eye view of the meeting without having to rewatch the recordings.
Another crucial area where AI brings substantial improvement is in the automation of email generation. By leveraging sophisticated algorithms, AI can craft personalized, context-specific emails based on a user’s communication style and preferences. This capability streamlines workflow by reducing the time spent on drafting emails and enhances communication effectiveness by ensuring messages are relevant and engaging.
You can upload files to ChatGPT and ask the tool to do data analysis on your behalf. From our presentation, you can see this example of a PDF from Nvidia as it is uploaded to ChatGPT:
And here are some of the results:
This way, you can summarize large documents and make them easier to understand, even to audiences that are not subject matter experts.
Say that you want a plan for creating content for the upcoming month. You could simply ask ChatGPT to do that for you. Based on the previously provided context, it can create a plan for your daily social media and blog content.
The great thing is that you can add more plugins to the mix to get inspiration. Here is an example:
You can ask the plugin to summarize the content from the video and give you suggestions for your own content.
Like many other types of content, you can ask ChatGPT to create an onboarding video for your SaaS application, based on your input. To get the best type of script, make sure to feed it relevant information about your product, target audience and the pain points it solves for them.
Once you’re done, you can use AI to generate the video for you. You can use D-ID to do just this - and choose the avatar you want to represent you, add pictures and screen recordings and make it fully authentic:
Of course, it’s not the most ideal way to create onboarding videos for a fully developed product, but it can work in a pinch if you’re preparing an MVP.
Trying to figure out where to take your SaaS product next, what markets to tap into or features to develop? You can feed ChatGPT the information about your product and more importantly, the current consumer market. Then, ask it for directions:
And here are the results:
If you want to explore generative AI beyond the massively popular ChatGPT, there are many tools you can play around with. Explore some of the most popular tools in the generative AI landscape below.
New tools emerge every day, but this list is a great start to exploring what’s out there!
SaaS businesses are able to speed up their growth with generative AI. With these tangible examples on how to use generative AI as a SaaS company, your team will become more productive, and your product more impactful.
Powering your SaaS application with machine learning and AI models can help you build a better product for your customers, automate your workflows and all of that with little knowledge of data science.
Interested to learn more about using artificial intelligence for your SaaS application? Download our AI whitepaper and get started today!
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
