Business applications for generative AI have rapidly proliferated since the technology became mainstream in late 2022.

Generative AI (GenAI), as its name suggests, can produce images and text. But that's just the beginning. This subset of artificial intelligence can also automate customer support, help developers write code and develop new products. The technology builds on several developments, including generative adversarial networks and large language models that potentially include trillions of parameters. Such advances let data scientists prep models using vast amounts of training data.

GenAI also stands to get a boost from an ongoing data center capacity buildout. Individual efforts include the Stargate Project, which aims to invest up to $500 billion over four years to build AI data centers in the U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled the initiative soon after his January 2025 inauguration, with the financial backing of investment firm MGX, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. Globally, hyperscale data centers will operate $1 trillion worth of AI-optimized servers by 2028, according to market research company Gartner.

Such investments set the stage for the following 10 GenAI benefits for business.

1. Create content on the fly

Rapid content creation emerged as an early benefit of GenAI. The ability to generate content, such as business email messages, marketing newsletters and blogs, continues to provide tangible value today.

Gartner expects the media industry and corporate marketing to use GenAI for text, image, video and audio generation. Thirty percent of large organizations' outbound marketing messages will be synthetically generated this year, according to the market research firm. Only about 2% of organizations created such content in 2022.

Content creation, however, has expanded well beyond business correspondence and digital marketing. Filmmakers, for example, now use GenAI. Kennedy Miller Mitchell, a media production company in Australia, uses GenAI to visualize scenes before shooting, using Stability AI's Stable Diffusion and hardware from Dell. The goal is to speed up preparatory work and boost productivity.

2. Improve the customer experience

Customer interaction has become one of the top business applications for GenAI. Companies can benefit from employing chatbots that offer a more humanlike response to customer inquiries. And those responses will have greater depth due to the scale of the underlying language models.

Contact centers and other customer experience touchpoints can use GenAI tools in a variety of ways. GenAI can fully automate Tier 1 support, which deals with routine customer inquiries, said Pablo Alejo, founder of consultancy Copilot. Here, chatbots or other conversational technologies help customers get their answers quickly. The self-service dimension to customer support also reduces a contact center's call volume and reserves customer support agents for more complex issues.

At higher levels of support, Tier 2 and Tier 3, GenAI can augment or support call center employees, Alejo noted. This agent-assist approach uses natural language processing to interpret an agent's conversation with a customer and provides relevant information to support the interaction. "That radically shapes how they operate," he said.

3. Boost business decision-making

Pluses such as boosting customer experience flow into a broader benefit: better business decision-making. When embedded in an organization's processes and data stores, GenAI can deliver critical information at the right time.

"A lot of the AI use cases are about information retrieval," said Arun Chandrasekaran, vice president, analyst and part of the AI strategy team at Gartner. "By using GenAI as part of a workflow," he explained, "you are able to retrieve contextual data."

In the customer support example, agents would traditionally consult with one or more knowledge repositories to determine the appropriate response to a customer's questions. But with GenAI, that agent has a tool that feeds them real-time information to answer complex queries, Chandrasekaran said. GenAI could potentially enhance a range of business decisions in an enterprise. "It enables organizations to move from making more gut-based decisions to making more data-driven decisions," he added.

. Automate coding

Generative AI tools help software engineers write new code. Popular options such as Anthropic's Claude, GitHub Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT have shortened the software development lifecycle for many organizations. "Because of GenAI," Alejo said, "we are able to create solutions at a fraction of the cost at a fraction of the time because one engineer can operate like ten."

Alejo said he has been writing more code with the help of tools such as Claude. "They are game-changing," he said. "Applications that would have taken me a month, I can write in a weekend."

An experiment in which three groups of developers used GitHub Copilot found that recent hires and junior developers were able to increase their weekly task output by 27% to 39%. Developers with more experience increased their task completion by 8% to 13%. The average productivity gain across the three groups -- 4,867 developers in total -- was 26%, according to researchers from Microsoft, MIT, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania who published their results in September 2024.

5. Drive productivity and cost reduction

The potential for GenAI productivity gains, and the resulting cost savings, cut across a range of business functions.

Software development and customer support are among the likely candidates for increased efficiency. Bill Bragg, CIO at predictive AI and GenAI products provider SymphonyAI, added human resources and legal to the list of applications.

SymphonyAI uses its Eureka AI platform internally to create GenAI applications. The company, for example, built a GenAI recruitment and hiring tool that helps managers compare candidates and match them against hiring criteria. Bragg said using the tool saved him three hours when considering 20 resumes for an open position.

A legal application, meanwhile, evaluates customers' non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) for compliance with SymphonyAI's contractual requirements. The tool lets users load a customer's NDA and prompt it to check for acceptability. The application flags paragraphs that don't meet the company's rules. It will also generate a written response to the customer, based on its findings, saving attorneys' time since they're only called upon to negotiate the specific sticking points on an NDA. "This takes something that is hours a week for some of our attorneys," Bragg noted, "and puts it in the hands of a person working with the customer."