AI Operating Priorities 

AI Operating Priorities 

AI deployment in our industry’s key operating functions remains modest, with impact still largely unquantified. The winners aren’t done — they’re just getting started.  

Is your AI why delivering AI ROI? The Outsell Accelerate A! Benchmark™ provides early signals for CEOs in the media, data, and information services sectors about adoption maturity and where it’s deployed operationally, as well as how it’s driving revenue from product use cases and licensing to LLMs. This post focuses on operational use cases, and it’s still early days.

Our benchmark is telling us that AI is now routine for text-heavy knowledge work. Content, Editorial, and Product Management functions are ahead vs. all other functions.  It’s being used to draft, summarize, research, and monitor competitors, always with a human reviewing the output. These are the most mature and widely adopted uses, where productivity and speed gains are already being captured.

In Marketing, Customer Service, Strategy, and Sales, adoption is broad yet shallow. AI shows up across many teams for point tasks like copy, chatbots, and call summaries, yet almost no one has embedded it deeply enough to run key aspects of a function.

Across the board, gains are still incidental rather than systematic, and the opportunity is to lift productivity across the whole function rather than a few tasks within it. 

This has implications for the media and events firms, as our recent survey of buyers shows their reliance on both buyer agents and selling agents yields positive impact with the vendors they interact with in this way. Media companies building bridges between buyers and sellers must also be at the top of their agentic game, especially in the sales function. 

The biggest deployment gaps are in HR & Talent, and especially Finance, which functionally remains largely untouched by AI.

Core transactional processes like reconciliation, order-to-cash, invoicing, collections, and treasury are barely explored. This is where untapped productivity and cost savings sit. Automating repetitive, high-volume work is a direct route to margin and scale. Using AI to improve compliance, contract management, and areas that mitigate risk inside finance and risk functions is critical too. The data points to plenty of opportunity to improve here. 

So, what are the top 5 operational use cases by function? We’ve listed each function in order of maturity of deployment and the top use cases within each (also in order) below: 

Data, Content & Editorial 

  1. Generate text (drafting research, articles)
  2. Summarize text
  3. Tag or classify text
  4. Data extraction (structuring unstructured content) 
  5. Insights generation

Product Management /Development 

  1. Code review & debugging
  2. Competitive intelligence monitoring
  3. Code & documentation generation
  4. Market/secondary research acceleration
  5. PRD creation or refinement

Marketing

  1. Copywriting & messaging
  2. Ad copy generation & refinement 
  3. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) 
  4. PR & partner content generation
  5. Copy repurposing

Customer Service & Support 

  1. Chatbots / virtual assistants
  2. Transcript summarization
  3. Automated responses 
  4. Knowledge base updates
  5. Personalized messaging

Strategy & Corporate Planning 

  1. Competitive intelligence 
  2. Market sizing/segmentation analysis
  3. Voice-of-customer insight synthesis 
  4. Portfolio/product opportunity prioritization
  5. Strategic plan drafting or synthesis

Sales 

  1. Call summarization 
  2. Lead scoring
  3. Outbound communications
  4. Task automation
  5. Pipeline prioritization

HR & Talent 

  1. AI upskilling and training
  2. Candidate screening and matching 
  3. Job description/role definition creation 
  4. AI literacy assessment & readiness tracking
  5. Policy lookup, guidance & adherence tracking 

Finance

  1. Financial forecasting & scenario modeling 
  2. Revenue, margin & cost variance analysis
  3. Account reconciliation & variance detection
  4. Cash flow forecasting & liquidity monitoring
  5. Invoice processing & classification

What must CEOs and their teams focus on right now? Three things:

  1. Focus on AI for reinvention vs. experimentation. Build businesses around AI vs. using AI around the business. 
  2. Make people the complement, not the casualty. The machines scale answers; people supply the trust, the context, and the “so what.”
  3. Focus on ROI. In a market where value is still unproven, the firm that can instrument and demonstrate return sets the standard.

The uncomfortable truth and the giant opportunity are one and the same; move from “adopted, and not yet paying off,” to essential, not optional.

AI is a marathon, not a sprint, and leaders and their teams are already lacing up. How are you measuring up? Take the Outsell Accelerate A! Benchmark™ today.

Schedule a confidential advisory call or consulting project to do scenario planning, evaluate your market and competitive positioning in the field, or better understand customers’ changing needs as they deploy AI in their own enterprises or to develop a new revenue stream from licensing your data, content, or editorial into AI use. Why leave value on the table?

And we’ll be deep into these topics and more at the Outsell CEO Summit October 1, 2026 in London. Find your AI ROI. Reserve your seat today!