Identifying and

scaling AI 

use cases

How early adopters focus their AI efforts

Contents
Foreword 3

Identifying opportunities for AI impact 6

Teaching your teams the six use case primitives 10
Gathering and prioritizing use cases 25
The next move: Department workflow mapping 29

Start today 31

More resources 33

2 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Foreword
In just two years AI leaders have seen Yet only

39% 1.5x
of U.S. adults have already Faster revenue growth, 1.6x
1%
of a recent McKinsey survey
used AI. In comparison, 
 higher shareholder returns, believed their AI
the internet reached just and 1.4x better return on investments had reached
20% adoption in its first invested capital than their full maturity.
two years. less advanced peers.

In just two years, 39% of U.S. adults have already used AI. The internet reached only 20% adoption
in the same time frame. The rise of AI is not only reshaping industries but also creating
opportunities for individual employees. AI frees people up to do higher-value work, expand their
skills, and advance their careers.


In one study, BCG found that in the last three years, AI leaders have seen 1.5x faster revenue
growth, 1.6x higher shareholder returns, and 1.4x better return on invested capital than their less
advanced peers.

According to McKinsey, 92% of companies plan to increase their investment in AI. Yet, many
organizations still need guidance on how to realize tangible value, with only 1% believing their AI
investments have reached full maturity.

We’ve observed firsthand what sets successful AI projects apart. Our insights come from 300 

of our most successful implementations, more than 4,000 adoption surveys, and over 2 million
business users.

This guide is designed to help your organization find and scale AI use cases that deliver clear value.
We break the process down into three steps:

3 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 03

Collecting and prioritizing

use cases that will have the
02
biggest impact on your
business.
Teaching your employees
fundamental use cases that
01
can speed up discovery
across every department.
Identifying opportunities to
apply AI in your business by
understanding what it
excels at.

Throughout, you'll find customer stories, practical checklists, and use case examples tailored to
different departments to support your team’s progress.

It’s important to recognize that AI adoption means much more than just finding the right use
cases. Beyond the scope of this guide are topics such as how you build an AI-first culture, cultivate
higher value use cases, and inspire adoption across your company. We’ll share more on those
issues in other guides, but for now, let’s zoom in on the process of finding the right use cases for
your company.

This is a time when you should be getting benefits

[from AI] and hope that your competitors are just
playing around and experimenting.

Erik Brynjolfsson
Stanford University, in “AI In the Workplace”,
McKinsey, January 2025

4 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Key principles for finding new use cases

Keep these three principles in mind. They're the backdrop to all the practical guidance you'll find in
the pages ahead.

01 AI should be led and encouraged by leadership.

02 Complex use cases can feel impressive, but often slow you down. Instead, empowering
employees to find use cases that work best for them, and your company, is often a faster
path to success.

03 Encouraging adoption with hackathons, use case workshops, and peer-led learning
sessions is a catalyst for many of our customers.

Let’s walk through the best steps for sourcing use cases for your teams.

5 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Identifying
opportunities

for AI impact

Step one is finding parts of your business that can be immediately improved with AI. 



One way to do that is to think of AI as a way to create super-assistants for your workforce. AI super-
assistants never get tired or lose focus. They’re always available whenever you need help. And they
can flex across almost any task, augmenting your employees’ skills.

To identify potential AI use cases, focus on common workplace challenges in these three key areas:

Repetitive low value tasks Skill bottlenecks Navigating ambiguity

6 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 Repetitive, low value tasks
Every job involves tedious, manual tasks that take people away from more strategic work. These
mindless tasks slow productivity, and make work more frustrating and less fulfilling. Summarizing
meeting notes, looking for trends in spreadsheet data, generating product requirements docs,
answering the same questions over and over… are all jobs AI can take on for your teams.

Claire Vo, Launch Darkly’s Chief Product Officer, has created an Anti To-Do List of tasks she no
longer needs to focus on. It includes things like monitoring KPIs, tracking competitors, and sharing
customer stories and anecdotes over Slack.

Every time I do something I find annoying, I ask

myself, how can I not have to do this again?

Claire Vo
Chief Product and Technology Officer

Launch Darkly

Skill bottlenecks
Work often slows when employees reach the limits of their expertise and need input from other
departments or experts. This can create bottlenecks and delay progress. 



AI can help bridge these gaps, helping employees expand their skillsets (from data analysis and
trend visualization to coding) without waiting for additional support. Expert teams get more time
back from lower value cross functional tasks, and everyone else learns to communicate in their
language.

Our product manager use AI to create interactive prototypes without needing to slow down
to wait for other teams to help.

7 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 Navigating ambiguity
Knowledge work often involves ambiguity and open-ended challenges. Employees may struggle to
get started or become blocked, causing projects to stall. Here AI can act as a catalyst, helping to
generate ideas, analyze data, and propose next steps when the path is unclear. 

People across all the companies we spoke to are using AI to kick-start their thinking and unblock
new ideas. They’re using it to brainstorm campaign ideas, look for quick insights in raw data,
analyze trends, or just figure out next steps when they’re not sure what to do.

Our marketing team brainstorms campaign ideas with voice mode in ChatGPT to unblock
creativity and start working towards a brief.

Focusing on these types of work can help you quickly identify high-impact AI opportunities, helping
your teams optimize workflows, reduce bottlenecks, and speed up innovation across your
organization.

We formed an AI automation task force with this

guiding principle. We asked all finance team
members to detail processes that they felt could
benefit from AI. We took that list and created a
roadmap of projects we wanted to explore.

Andrea Ellis
Chief Financial Officer, 

Fanatics Betting and Gaming

8 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Action items

Ask your teams to list scenarios and tasks
 Struggle to get started or run into blocker
where they:
Spend a lot of time on manual work that
others don’t always appreciate or value, or
isn’t the best use of their time (i.e., their “anti-
to-do list”

Hit a skills bottleneck until another team can

come along and help them (data analysis,
design, on-brand writing, and web
development are good examples)

Use these lists to start sourcing possible spaces for new use cases

This can be done at the start of a workshop or a hackathon to help your employees see 

where to start.

Or, use this prompt to ask ChatGPT for some interesting use cases.

I am a [role] at [company]. We recently implemented ChatGPT at our organization. What

are the best use cases for my role?

9 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Teaching your
teams the six use
case primitives

Once you’ve given your teams a framework for identifying new AI opportunities, the next step is to
train them on the fundamental ways they can use AI. To help with this, we analyzed over 600 use
cases sourced from our customers. Most use cases fall into one of six 'primitives'—fundamental use
case types that apply across all departments and disciplines:

10 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Six simple AI use cases

Content creation

Automation Research

Ideation/strategy Coding

Data analysis

These primitives are a quick way to help your employees find the most promising use cases for
your business. Each primitive represents hundreds of use cases we’ve seen across industries, roles,
and workflows, making them a fast track to scalable value.

Let's take a closer look at each primitive, starting with Content creation:

11 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

The six primitives of AI use cases

Content creation
AI can support content creation across all teams—whether summarizing sales calls or generating
first drafts of strategy documents, blog posts, web pages, and even images and visualizations. 

We see teams using AI to edit and polish their work, then bring it in as a last-minute proofreader.



AI can automatically write in your company’s style and apply your tone of voice guide; follow your
preferred document structures; or even provide feedback on writing. It can then translate your
work into different languages or repurpose it for different audiences, channels, or programs.

When writing, AI can take in the complete context of a conversation or consider a set of uploaded
documents to shape the output. For example, try uploading your writing guide or use your five best
blog posts, then prompt ChatGPT to create a detailed writing guide based on those examples.

12 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Content creation use cases to get started with:

Marketing: Create campaign strategies, headlines or email campaigns.

Generate content outlines and first drafts. Repurpose content

for different audiences or channels.

Finance teams: Create draft policy docs and technical accounting memos 


for expert review.

Product teams: Build product requirements docs, generate product

descriptions, release notes, launch communications, 


and user guides.

Sales teams: Generate account plans, scripts for calls, and follow-up emails.

Promega scaled messaging across markets and audiences

Promega, the life sciences company, saved 135 hours in their first six months using 


ChatGPT Enterprise for first-draft email campaigns. They also use it to generate 


campaign briefs from a message doc, and to translate any copy into paid ads for 


specific marketing channels.

The time we get back from aligning on the strategy 


of emails can be invested into the content generation

that improves the email experience. I don’t know the

last time I wrote a marketing email without using 


this GPT.

Kari Siegenthaler

Marketing Strategist, Promega

13 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

2

Research
AI is widely used for research across industries. From quick learning about new concepts (like AI
adoption or design thinking); to searching the web for relevant articles or competitive data; to
more comprehensive, multistep research projects that scan the web for articles, data points, and
insights. We see teams uploading long, internal documents for quick insights too.

One of the biggest advantages of using AI for research is that you can specify the format and
structure of how the analysis is presented to you: in table format, bullet points, organized in
specific sections, or cross-referenced.



AI’s attention to detail and ability to follow instructions makes it a great research assistant.

Research use cases to get started with:

Sales and Marketing: Investigate new industries, understand competitors better, 


and research new audiences.

Finance: Search for benchmarks from publicly listed companies, M&A

targets, or articles and guidance on accounting standards.

Product: Size new markets, research competitors, identify trends, 


and analyze user feedback.

IT: Search the web for new vendors and rate their products’
strengths and weaknesses.

Software Engineering: Review API endpoints and external documentation.

14 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 Introducing deep research

Deep research is a new agentic capability in ChatGPT that conducts multi-step research on
the internet, independently. Give it a prompt and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize
hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research
analyst. Find out more.

15 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

3

Coding

Many software engineers are power users of AI. They use it for debugging, generating first-draft
code in unfamiliar languages, porting code from one language to another, and rubber-ducking their
code. In the past two years, AI’s capabilities in math, science, and coding across many languages
have significantly improved, and many tools now even offer real-time code previews.

We’re also seeing many non-coders take up coding with the assistance of AI tools. Just by using
natural language, marketers and finance teams are able to build Python scripts to automate
processes, SQL queries to retrieve data, or even visualizations with front-end code for websites or
internal presentations.

Coding use cases to start with:

Software Engineers: Debug or rubber duck code, port it to other languages, and
research API endpoints.

Marketing: Build interactive charts and data visualizations to share with

web and design teams, or write SQL for data analysis.

Finance: Create Python scripts to automate parts of the monthly close.

Product: Build interactive prototypes to quickly flesh out new 


product ideas.

16 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 Tinder speeds up coding

Tinder’s engineering team uses ChatGPT to generate first-draft syntax when working with

non-intuitive languages—like Bash scripts—that require specialized knowledge. ChatGPT

improves their coding efficiency, making it easy to reference and query external API

documentation, and troubleshoot architectural and design decisions.

There were tasks in Jira that used to get deprioritized

because they felt like a chore. Now I wind up taking

them on because I know it's going to be easier to

tackle with ChatGPT at my side.

Chris Fuller

Staff Software Engineer, Tinder

17 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

4

Data analysis

AI helps anyone harmonize data from different sources, identify insights and trends, and work with
complex spreadsheet data without needing advanced Excel, SQL, or Python skills. 

You can provide AI with multiple spreadsheets or screenshots of dashboards to support quick
analysis. It can interpret spreadsheet data, understand visual charts, and even help format your
output for reporting. You can also guide how results are structured, such as specifying preferred
chart types, summary formats, or comparison logic.

Data analysis use cases to get started with:

Marketing: Upload webinar attendance data and quickly visualize it.

Summarize key trends from a dashboard screenshot.

Product: Analyze trends, social media feedback, or upload CRM data 


on feature requests to surface new opportunities.

Sales: Review your account lists to find your strongest accounts. 


Map leads to accounts and score them for intent signals.

Finance: Quickly analyze expense data and look for trends, or harmonize
data from different spreadsheets and databases.

18 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 Poshmark finds more time for insights and strategy

Poshmark, the fashion marketplace, used ChatGPT to generate the Python code that
reconciles millions of spreadsheet rows for their business performance analysis. They then
use AI to generate weekly performance reports and accounting memos for executives,
saving hours of manual work every week.

We’ve dramatically reduced manual work and

improved speed, accuracy, communication and
insights. I'm seeing an elevation of everyone's job.

Rodrigo Brumana
CFO, Poshmark

19 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

5

Ideation and strategy

Ideation and Strategy use cases are popular across all teams, from brainstorming a new blog post
to helping structure a document, troubleshooting a strategy, or giving feedback on work based on
key goals or stakeholder preferences.

As AI models become more multimodal, we’re seeing teams use voice and vision to interact with AI
just as they would with a colleague.

And as models become more capable of thinking through complex problems, we’re seeing many
teams build strategic plans with them, taking into account their data, goals, context, constraints,
and dependencies.

Ideation and strategy use cases to get started with:

Marketing: Brainstorm campaign ideas based on new opportunities.

Upload your marketing brief and ask what’s missing. Prompt 

for a go-to-market plan for a product launch.

Finance: Build a market expansion plan for a new geography, taking into
account local competitors, risks, size of opportunity, and
resource demands.

Product: Build launch plans that reflect all dependencies and risks.
Upload your PRD and identify areas of weakness before an
executive review.

Sales: Practice your pitch or discovery skills with voice mode.

20 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 Match Group simulates focus groups

Match Group, the global leader in online dating, is experimenting with GPT-4’s multimodal
capabilities to run focus group simulations for product usability. By uploading wireframes
and asking ChatGPT to mimic a specific persona, designers can pose questions while they
ask the “user” to navigate the interface and provide feedback. The result: new ideas for
product innovations without the extra cost and delay.

21 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

6

Automations

Many use cases involve automating parts of a task. We’ve seen customers identify repeatable,
routine tasks and design ways to hand them off to AI. Automations can be simple, like generating
weekly competitive updates, or more complex, like creating a finance report for weekly executive
briefings, ready for human review. 

Memory and custom instructions are the key to automating these kinds of processes. Custom
GPTs are the method for sharing them. By creating a standard set of instructions, uploading the
same document, and specifying the same output every time, teams are able to offload lower 

value tasks.

Today these automations are often individual tasks, but with products like deep research 

and Operator, we’re moving into a world where AI can take on multi-step tasks independently 

and on schedule.

Automation use cases to get started with:

Marketing: Create a standard report and visualizations for quick webinar

readouts. Or build Slack update summaries from meeting notes
or transcripts.

Product: Create a launch update summarizer. Or summarize and share

weekly customer insights. Turn meeting notes into Slack posts
for executives that summarize dependencies and next steps.

Finance: Turn weekly financial data into an executive overview, with

alerts for changes that need attention.

IT: Upload your software architecture as a screenshot and ask for

key dependencies, risks, and opportunities for optimization.

22 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 BBVA automates parts of their Credit Analysis work

BBVA’s Credit Analysis Pro GPT helps credit risk analysts accelerate their assessments by

pulling unstructured data from a variety of sources, such as annual reports, ESG

assessments, and the press.

Teach your teams the fundamentals of each

Action items primitive and provide examples for each

department.

Next, start brainstorming ideas for new use

cases, running hackathons, or company-wide

competitions to see who can source the most

impactful use cases.

Learn about Bain’s use case olympics for a

specific framework.

Set up a spreadsheet, or Slack channel where

you can collect all the use cases that your

teams come up with.

23 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 How Estée Lauder Corporation built a repeatable GPT development process

Estée Lauder’s GPT Lab starts with cross-discipline teams—including a business user, a
subject matter expert, and a technical lead—to identify and develop high-impact use cases.
Their process is simple and repeatable:

01 Design The business user defines the purpose, scope, and

audience in a two-page brief

02 Prepare The SME gathers relevant data to shape the use case
around best practice

03 Build and Test The tech lead builds the GPT, integrates the data sets,
and tests the GPT for accuracy and consistency

04 Launch The full team deploys the GPT and creates a user guide

05 Pivot and Scale The full team uses feedback loops to iterate and optimize
based on GPT performance

“Designing the right use cases means asking the right questions,” says Charmaine Pek,
Director of ChatGPT Enterprise Adoption. “Why do we want to build this GPT? What is the
problem that we're trying to solve? What impact will it have?”

For more detail, read about the Estée Lauder GPT Lab.

24 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Gathering and
prioritizing 

use cases

Once teams understand key use cases and begin identifying problems to solve, use cases tend to
multiply quickly.

The challenge then shifts from discovery to prioritization. Which use cases can you scale to impact
all employees? Which are most likely to deliver cost efficiencies now? Which might lead to a new
product or revenue stream?

Our customer success teams use this Impact/Effort Framework to help enterprise customers
prioritize use cases. It’s a simple quadrant that scores each use case against the value to the
company and the degree of effort it requires.

25 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Impact/effort framework

High ROI focus Quick wins with strong impact and low effort—often the best

place to start building momentum.

Self-service The lowest-effort projects that a single user might spin up 


for themselves as a personal assistant on a given task. 


Many start as individual solutions, but often become 


valuable across teams.

High-value/high-effort Often transformational (like Moderna’s Dose GPT or Klarna’s

customer assistant) but these use cases typically require more

time, planning, and resources to build. Many teams start with

quick wins to build momentum and use them as inspiration for

investing in higher-value projects.

High-effort/low-impact These can be safely put aside for now. But new products and

capabilities might make them easier to build and deploy, so be

open to promoting them.

26 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

 High value

High ROI focus Scope and prioritize

Tinder created a GPT to democratize access to their Indeed, built an automated way to explain to jobseekers why a
Command Line Interface, giving the whole product team the given opening was being recommended to them. It took
power to prototype, test, and debug without needing to code. months of testing and iteration but the uplift was well worth it:
a 20% increase in job applications started.

Low effort High effort

Self-service Deprioritize
Financial advisors at Morgan Stanley use AI as super- Building a custom AI assistant to generate web forms—

assistants to summarize market analyses and generate even though your team already uses a reliable, integrated 

research reports. tool for this.

Low value

(Thanks to Jeret Shuck from Softbank for showing us how he uses this simple but powerful tool).

62%
of AI's value lies in core business functions
Evaluating and prioritizing your AI use case
opportunities in this way helps accelerate
the big wins that create further interest 

and investment.

27 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Action items Promote the prioritization framework
company-wide, encouraging employees to
use it in team meetings to identify the 

best ideas.

For high-value, high-effort use cases,

consider deploying a Custom GPT as you
scope the work required.

Have your leaders champion use cases that

make an impact on whole departments. 

Top-down support is a key hallmark of
successful AI deployments.

Re-evaluate this scoring each quarter as the

high-effort use cases you have today might
become low-effort as AI capabilities advance.

28 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

The next move:

Department

workflow

mapping

Most teams begin by using AI for individual tasks: editing blog posts, generating campaign briefs,

or drafting policies. It’s easier to think of AI in the context of specific, discrete tasks. 

But as we watch power users embed AI into everything they do, we often see them find use cases

that start to span multi-step workflows.

Here’s how a multi-step flow might take shape: Use deep research to explore market trend

Analyze customer data to estimate

opportunity siz

Brainstorm a launch strategy using 


voice mod

Generate messaging, campaign assets, 


and translations

29 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Helping your teams think of AI as something they can embed from start to finish will prepare them

for a future where AI agents can complete entire projects on their behalf.

An example:

Using AI across a Marketing workflow

Deep research Data analysis to Brainstorming Content Automate

to understand size the on campaign creation to help content

market 
 audience and strategy and craft key localization and

trends and opportunity developing 
 messages
 channel

opportunities the brief and copy optimization

Encourage power users to break workflows

Action items into individual tasks, identify core use cases

(primitives), and clearly map each step.

30 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

Start today

AI isn’t like traditional software or cloud apps. Learning to harness its strengths requires a new
mindset. But our work with our customers has shown us how quickly people across all disciplines
can learn this mindset and start to spot high-impact use cases in their work.

Kickstarting this process comes down to helping your organization take three steps:

01 Understand where AI Identify parts of your business that can immediately 


adds value benefit from AI

02 Teach your employees Help teams explore foundational use cases, and start building
fundamental use cases their own

03 Prioritize what to scale Focus on high-impact, low-effort opportunities using the

Impact/Effort Framework

31 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

The more people work with AI to re-engineer tasks and workflows, the more opportunities 

they uncover.

We hope this guide gives your team a clear way to begin. We’re here to support the journey as 

you move from ideas to outcomes.

We’re looking at every business process—from legal

to research, to manufacturing, to commercial—and
thinking about how to redesign them with AI.

Stéphane Bancel
CEO, Moderna

32 Identifying and scaling AI use cases

More resources
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33 Identifying and scaling AI use cases