Game-Changing AI Changes at 6 Businesses, Including a 90% Cost Cut

There’s a lot of talk about how businesses should be using AI, but for many businesses, it’s still hard to envision exactly what they’re working toward. What are the tangible rewards of making sure your team is integrating AI into their workflows? Or perhaps more importantly, what specific goal is your team trying to accomplish by using AI?

We spoke to six business leaders on the most transformative ways their companies have implemented AI, saving time and money or improving their products, so you can envision the possibilities.

1. Finding the best ingredients.

“We make multivitamins, and used Claude Code to build seven native Shopify apps in two weeks. Our science and marketing teams use AI for raw ingredient evaluation and research into alternative suppliers to reduce cost or improve sourcing. It synthesizes competitors’ formulation details to strengthen our positioning. The real value is measured in the time it frees up for our team to innovate.” — Kat Schneider, CEO, Ritual

2. Faster, cheaper financial operations.

“We’re a brand incubator, and paid a significant fee for a financial operations platform that was siloed and slow. Earlier this year, we rebuilt it from scratch using simple software and AI tooling. It took three months. Our budget-to-actual reporting used to land 15 to 30 days after month-end. We now run it weekly, and the whole system costs roughly one-tenth of the old one.” — Lindsey Newton, CFO, A-Frame Brands

3. Smarter inventory management.

“Our platform offers furnished, short-term apartment rentals, and AI has become a core part of how we manage that system. That includes matching guests to inventory more efficiently, optimizing rates in real time, and streamlining guest communications. I’ve learned that adoption usually follows utility. If it makes the system faster and more reliable, it just becomes how the business runs.” — Bill Smith, CEO, Landing 

4. Accelerating outreach.

“When you run a one-man shop, your biggest constraint isn’t capital or clients — it’s your time. AI allowed me to grow and finally build a team. We’re a political campaign technology platform, and integrated custom AI workflows and prompts built around our specific services, including peer-to-peer texting, voter outreach, and client onboarding. What took hours now takes minutes.” — Travis Trawick, CEO, FullPAC

5. Dialing in the data.

“AI data analysis made our teams faster and more responsive. The steeper curve is protecting our data, IP, and infrastructure. We started by asking what we could open up to AI, but recently shifted that mindset. Now we default to open, then identify what must be protected. We’re still getting comfortable, but we believe our unlock will be having a strong advocate in each team.” —Nicole Otto, CEO, Ruggable

6. Staying lean to keep fees low.

“We’re a live-selling platform, and with the help of AI, we are able to keep the team very lean, which in turn keeps our selling fees low. As a result, sellers on Palmstreet can take more profit. From accelerating product iterations and analyzing user behavior to risk control and keeping the community safe, it allows us to move faster without sacrificing quality. We adopted a simple mindset: if something feels repetitive with low creativity over time, AI should be used to make it more efficient.” — Chen Li, CEO, Palmstreet