AI is no longer a futuristic add-on for businesses; it’s becoming the quiet engine behind smoother operations, faster decisions, and ultimately better customer experiences.
At Incredible AI, we spend every day helping organisations solve real operational challenges with custom AI-powered tools. Across industries, the same patterns keep appearing, and as we solve operational problems, we see which AI applications deliver the most value, with the fastest return on investment.
These are the five most impactful ways businesses are using AI today, based on what we’re seeing in the field.
1. Connecting disjointed systems (and creating a single source of truth)
Most businesses operate with disconnected systems: spreadsheets, legacy tools, cloud platforms, and purpose-built databases that don’t talk to each other. This creates inefficiency, manual and repetitive work, and exposes businesses to risk. AI is changing that.
A finance manager we worked with at a U.S.-based specialty beverage products company was spending up to 60% of her week reconciling information across HubSpot, QuickBooks, and PandaDoc. We helped design a custom Glide app that connected and synced all three platforms, automating what had been a time-consuming, low-value process and replacing it with a single, reliable source of truth.
By using AI to interpret, map, and sync data across systems, companies can finally build one reliable source of truth. Teams stop double-handling information, errors decrease, and leaders gain the visibility they’ve often been missing for years.
2. Automating manual workflows
If a process is repetitive, rules-based, or requires someone to move things along, AI can likely automate it. Look out for tasks like approval flows and task routing, data entry, document handling, and compliance checks. These activities often consume hours each week, and well-designed AI integrations can remove them from the to-do list, giving teams clean, consistent workflows without needing to understand the technology behind them.
We’re currently working with a leading swimming pool installation company in the U.S. to automate several manual parts of their sales and operations process. We’re building an end-to-end sales and CRM tool that uses an AI phone agent to handle inbound enquiries, capture leads, and route them to the correct regional team, all while updating the CRM automatically. Their field agents can also call the assistant on-site to instantly access company policies and regulatory requirements, replacing the need to search through hundreds of pages of documentation.
The system even generates real-time visual mock-ups of how different pool designs would look in a customer’s backyard, applying colour, style, and accessory options to build an accurate visualisation, and then saving the images directly into the CRM. By integrating tools like ElevenLabs and Twilio into Glide, the company has eliminated major manual workflows and freed both office and field teams to focus on higher-value work.
3. Smarter inventory management
Inventory is a balancing act: hold too much, and you tie up cash; hold too littl,e and things grind to a halt.
Smart AI integrations can now help businesses maintain the right stock levels by:
- forecasting demand
- predicting shortages
- reading patterns in sales, seasons, and supplier behaviour
- flagging anomalies before they become an issue
For warehouses, trades businesses, retailers, and manufacturers, we’re seeing that this is often one of the highest value use cases for AI. And a well-designed custom interface gives teams real-time visibility without needing to dig through systems or spreadsheets.
What this could look like: picture a distribution company using AI to analyse sales trends, supplier lead times, and historical fluctuations to automatically recommend reorder points for each product line. When stock levels drop below predicted thresholds, the system alerts the purchasing team (or even creates draft purchase orders), ensuring they stay ahead of demand without overstocking. With all of this running through a single, easy-to-use interface, teams can make confident decisions based on live data rather than gut feel or manual checks.
4. Automating quoting & sales
For many of our clients, quoting is a bottleneck; it’s time-consuming, error-prone, and often depends on one or two people with full knowledge of how it’s done.
We’re using AI to help clients generate accurate quotes instantly by pulling from pricing rules, product data, historical jobs, and customer context. Sales teams spend less time preparing paperwork and more time talking to customers.
We recently built a custom quoting app for a global industrial cleaning supply company that reduced their quoting time from around 45 minutes to under 2 minutes. They can now deliver clean, consistent quotes that can be reviewed and sent with a single tap, making the process faster and more reliable for the whole team and delivering a superior customer experience.
5. Real-time reporting & dashboards
Traditional reporting is slow and resource-intensive. Someone exports data, cleans it up, builds a chart, and sends a spreadsheet or PDF, sometimes days after the decisions should have been made.
AI is changing this by enabling reports to build themselves. We’re now regularly helping businesses use AI to:
- process incoming data in real time
- identify trends, risks, or anomalies as they emerge
- turn raw information into meaningful, actionable insights
- generate custom dashboards that update in real time
This results in a shift from reactive reporting to proactive visibility. Instead of waiting for static documents, organisations get live, continuously updated insights into what’s happening across the business, allowing them to act faster, make better decisions, and unlock far more value from their data.
For a New Zealand central government department we worked with, reporting was fragmented; teams were emailing spreadsheets back and forth, storing documents in different places, and struggling to manage access for the right people and roles. We used Glide to securely streamline their data collection and reporting by creating a centralised, role-based system that gives stakeholders easy access to the information and insights relevant to them. The result is a single, collaborative hub for resources and reporting, replacing confusing lists and siloed files with a simple, secure, and user-friendly interface.
Why these five use cases deliver the fastest impact
Across businesses of all sizes, these use cases have something in common - they solve real operational friction to free up time and reduce risk.
They remove manual work, eliminate bottlenecks, and reduce cost, giving teams more time to focus on growth. And platforms like Glide, with built-in AI, are enabling businesses to get solutions live in weeks, not months, and continue improving them as the business evolves.
AI doesn’t need to be complicated to be transformational, and it doesn't need to replace existing systems. Often, the biggest gains come from applying AI to enhance systems and processes you already have in place, to solve everyday challenges that have been slowing teams down for years.
