The more specific your AI use cases, the better the ROI
Gartner said it best. The most successful AI transformations are amplifying people’s skillsets, not replacing them. Organizations generating ROI have used AI to remove everyday frictions and automate workflows. And they’ve invested aggressively in upskilling employees to run and scale autonomous systems.
What all this shows is that applying AI to your small, thorny (and sometimes surprising) business challenges is probably going to deliver the best results. At iSoftStone, our teams have found this to be true time and time again.
7 people-centered AI use cases with impact
Here are seven examples — from developing new AI products to implementing partner software — of how we’ve put intelligent transformation to work, and how we’ve delivered AI power that made people’s day-to-day tasks easier and boosted their efficiency.
1. A presentation agent for effortless, on-brand PowerPoint slides
A Microsoft Teams call, a group brainstorm, raw ideas with incredible power, a hard deadline to present to senior leadership … and zero design budget to make it happen. It’s a common story. Too common. And we thought it was time to change that.
Presentation Agent by iSoftStone uses AI to generate company-branded PowerPoint decks directly from Microsoft Teams, without manual formatting or design work. We’ve made it openly available through Microsoft Marketplace and, because we eat our own dog food here at iSoftStone, our teams now use it every single day.
2. Bringing AI to the showroom floor & boosting human-to-human connection
You don’t get more real-world than a sales interaction in a furniture showroom. After all, the rapport between customer and sales rep or the experience of running your hand over fabric seems a world away from AI.
But with a catalog that’s 10,000 SKUs strong, it can be hard for even the best and most knowledgeable salespeople to remember every nuance and detail of every product. Enter the AI product recommender we built that simplified product discovery and improved confidence on the floor.
The retailer we developed it for was delighted by how effectively AI could be used in a showroom context. Says their VP of business intelligence and GenAI, “By reducing friction in the buying journey and making recommendations feel intuitive and personal, we are already seeing early lifts in conversion rates, average order value, and customer satisfaction.”
3. Face and object detection with Nuxeo DAM + Amazon Rekognition
We work regularly with a nonprofit that manages a large, complex visual archive stretching back many decades. The archive’s metadata was patchy; finding the right image was frustrating and took hours of work.
As we’ve talked about before, we’re big fans of adding AI face and object detection to DAMs. So when the organization asked for help, we had the answer. We built a solution powered by Amazon Rekognition that seamlessly integrated with their Nuxeo DAM instance.
Now, the organization’s images can be automatically identified, tagged, and indexed. They’re truly searchable, and the organization’s team can focus solely on curating the archives. It’s the kind of large-scale data management that would be unfeasible without AI.
4. Hello, AI invoice processing, farewell OCR training
There’s so much that goes into configuring custom OCR models: templates, training, and rules. Hours, too, of working with vendors to ensure their invoice layout can be read accurately.
Smart Invoice Agent by iSoftStone instantly removes that friction for finance and accounts payable teams. Available on Microsoft Marketplace and powered by Azure OpenAI Vision models, it reads and analyzes invoices the way a human would.
We even made sure that it can merge fragments by invoice ID and deduplicate line items across 100-page documents. Think structured data, delivered in seconds, and more space for the analysis and skilled work your team excels at.
5. AI agents make marketing processes 2x efficient
Yes, even this marketing team will admit it: writing briefs, setting up tickets, and drafting and reviewing content are all time-consuming. Any busy marketing organization that fields multiple requests is going to create bottlenecks. At enterprise scale, those bottlenecks blunt a competitive edge.
The marketing team at a Big Five technology company needed our help to create a faster, smarter way to intake and manage projects. We built an AI-driven workflow capable of organizing and streamlining requests and generating first-draft briefs, all with validation and approval steps baked in.
They were soon seeing increased intake completion rates and happier stakeholders who benefitted from clearer project communication from kick-off through delivery.
6. Upselling soars with a custom AI sales engine
A global soft drinks company approached our Asia team with two pain points: One, calculating B2B upsell recommendations took sales reps three hours or more per account. Two, the average onboarding for their new reps took three months.
To fully capitalize on the regional momentum they were enjoying, both processes had to become more efficient. We built an AI sales engine scoped to the company’s entire SKU range and the needs of their enterprise customers.
With this organic, intuitive AI sales tool, many new reps finished onboarding in as little as three weeks. And the engine reliably produced targeted recommendations in under 5 minutes. In fact, the recommendations were so accurate that they did something beyond the project’s KPIs — they increased sales, too.
7. An end-to-end social commerce engine, built for the future of retail
The creator economy is on track to reach $600 billion by 2030, but many brands still struggle to measure the impact of influencers. Few marketing and e-commerce teams have tools that will help them turn social commerce into a true sales channel.
That’s why we created CatalystM. It’s the first AI-powered influencer marketing platform in the USA expressly built for social commerce at scale. CatalystM lets you detect trends and find creators in seconds, build campaigns in minutes, manage every relationship, approve content, and measure impact. All from one platform.
Our early users report an 80% reduction in creator management workloads and 4.2x the average ROAS from campaigns, and they’re just getting started. If you’re curious to learn more about CatalystM, reach out to the team for a demo.
It’s vital to keep assessing potential AI use cases through a people-first lens, especially as the “dream big” wave of AI hype fades and scrutiny on ROI intensifies. That means first having your AI strategy in place, being really aligned with the needs of your people, and then getting hyper-specific with AI tools and AI solutions.
Where are your bottlenecks, frictions, and pain points? We’re ready to help.
