10 Ways Competitors Are Making Money With AI

We are living in the most innovative time in human history. Not only is the internet itself still young (only a couple of decades) but now with the development of AI, we are standing on the edge of a wildly complex new frontier.

Everyone I speak to about AI recognizes its incredible potential. But, most marketers and business owners don’t actually know how to use it to help them make more money today.

The truth is; AI is already here. While there may be exciting developments in the future, you can and should start leveraging it in your business as fast as possible.

I’ve put together a summary of the 10 ways you can use AI to improve your sales & marketing practices with the tools already on the market.

The largest competitors in every industry are already using these to stay ahead. If you let them, they’ll continue to get farther and farther ahead.

Here’s what you need to know (I hope you find it useful):

1. Hyper-Personalized Marketing Campaigns

The future of marketing lies in hyper-personalization, where campaigns speak directly to individual customer needs. Tools like Segment and Dynamic Yield are powerful for analyzing data, but their true potential is unlocked by taking the new customer segments and creating unique content specialized for them.

You can customize a lot about your marketing to fit the customers exact needs:

• Emails
• Ads
• SMS
• Offers
• Landing Pages

With AI assisting the heavy lifting of data processing, marketers can spend more time designing strategies that help them connect on a deeper level with their audience and convert more business.

2. Predictive Lead Scoring

AI tools like Salesforce Einstein and HubSpot empower sales teams to identify their most promising leads quickly. Lead scoring essentially measures prospect behavior and attributes values to the actions they take.

Visited the contact page? +10 points
Unsubscribed from the email list? -20 points
Clicked on a promo ad? +50 points

This scoring system allows you to (at a glance) know who in the pipeline is most engaged with your company. Prospects who are interacting with you more are also significantly more likely to convert.

As prospects meet different desirable criteria, the sales team is notified so they can engage that lead immediately while they are at peak interest levels.

The AI portion of this helps you to track and learn at a massive scale. You can effectively use all of your own data (ads, web activity, CRM, etc) but you can also leverage off-platform data (public search records, social media activity, hiring activity, etc). The insights you get from this enable your sales team to book more meetings with the right people and close more deals.

The blend of human intuition and AI-driven prioritization allows teams to maximize their energy on the opportunities that matter most, driving stronger outcomes across the board.

3. AI-Driven Content Creation

AI platforms such as Jasper and Copy.ai help generate initial drafts and spark fresh ideas, but they don’t replace the need for expert editing and strategic planning. Great content comes from combining AI’s efficiency with the creativity of marketing professionals who understand the nuances of audience engagement.

AI copywriting tools are essentially taught to speak like the “average” publication online. They scrape the internet, learning about all sorts of information, but primarily how people write online.

That means if you rely completely on AI for content writing you’re likely to blend in, you’ll sound just like every other article online. Having a human behind the controls helps to make sure that your marketing copy isn’t just regurgitated from Google Search, but rather a strategic set of decisions being made.

AI makes things fast, copywriters make things great.

4. Dynamic Ad Targeting

AI-powered platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager dynamically adjust campaigns based on audience behavior, but their success depends on a well-thought-out strategy. Marketing professionals determine the right audience segments and craft compelling ad creatives that are relevant to the audience.

Essentially the ad platforms allow you to upload a massive amount of data about your target demographic & business. They also have a huge database of their own that is constantly being updated.

This means that when your ads run, they can make custom suggestions that enable additional features & ad variations that improve the overall performance of your ads.

The image above features some examples of data inputs on the left, and potential outcomes on the right. All of the dots in the middle represent ad variations that can be tested to generate the best possible outcomes.

AI helps make sure your ads are constantly learning & improving to get better over time.

5. Intelligent Email Campaigns

Email remains one of the most profitable marketing channels, and tools like Mailchimp and Klaviyo bring precision to the process. AI can optimize when emails are sent and which content performs best, but it’s skilled marketers who understand how to craft messages that inspire action. The combination of automation and expertise leads to emails that consistently generate revenue and nurture relationships.

6. Chatbots for Lead Generation and Nurturing

AI chatbots like Drift and Intercom are changing how businesses interact with web visitors, communities, and even social media followers. Chatbots handle repetitive tasks like answering FAQs or collecting basic information for support or sales teams.

These chatbots essentially function as the “front desk” person for your online presence. A quick and easy way for people to get more information about the things they want to know.

AI chatbots will have complete conversations naturally just like a real agent would. They can share helpful links, collect contact information, and in some cases even complete system updates on your behalf.

Things like:

• Adding leads to a CRM
• Scheduling meetings
• Creating a support ticket
• Updating a customer contact information
• Sending notifications to relevant team members
• Completing entire transactions directly in chat

Not every business needs an AI-enabled chatbot, but if you’re handling thousands of website visitors per month it’s likely to be worth the investment.

7. AI-Powered Sales Assistants

AI tools such as Gong and Read.ai attend and track sales calls. They do the basics like transcribing meetings, recording videos, and sending notes via email after the call.

But here’s the cool part:

You can also…

1. Automatically summarize the call into a paragraph for quick skimming
2. Automatically create bullet point notes for important talking points
3. Automatically generate a list of “to-do” action items for each attendee
4. Monitor attendee sentiment (happy, sad, angry, excited, etc)
5. Identify the peaks and valleys of your conversations
6. Monitor your speaking patterns (too fast or too slow?)
7. Identify areas of bias (are reps using language that could put the prospect off your company?)
8. Measure attendee talk time (who is talking and for how long?)
9. Detect resource waste (Jessie didn’t speak in this meeting, let’s save him the hour next time)
10. Automatically generate a “trailer” for the call, a few minutes cut from the call video to show the most important moments

These tools allow your team to be armed with knowledge about the way they meet with prospects and each other. These features allow your sales team to improve rapidly while also minimizing expenses by cutting back on meetings that could’ve been an email.

8. Enhanced Customer Retargeting

Retargeting platforms like AdRoll and Criteo leverage AI to keep your brand in front of prospects who didn’t convert on the first visit. These tools create a constant presence, throughout the internet.

While retargeting can happen without AI, platforms like this can help you squeeze more performance out of your budget in a few ways:

1. They customize every ad to the platform (images, videos, text, all customized to fit the individual site or app the ad is displayed on)
2. They have a larger platform library (rather than choosing a specific platform to retarget on, they dynamically spread your budget across all of them)
3. Connected TV (TV ads are re-emerging through streaming platforms like Netflix, however, they are better than ever now that you can target them based on individual people)

Retargeting campaigns work best when thoughtfully designed to balance visibility with value, turning “maybe later” into “yes, now.”

9. Automated Sales Pipeline Management

Tools like Hubspot and Pipedrive help businesses keep their sales pipelines organized and moving, automating follow-ups and reducing manual data entry.

The latest innovations in AI take this a step further allowing you to trigger custom CRM actions depending on prospects’ behaviors off of owned platforms as well.

1. Competitor website behavior
2. Google searches
3. Social platform interactions
4. Email conversations
5. Sales calls

These AI-enabled automation can save you thousands of hours every year in what otherwise would be simple tasks. Sending emails, updating deal stages, notifying reps, building reports, seding/creating proposals.

10. Virtual Influencers and AI Creators

Believe it or not, the person in the image above does not exist.

Platforms such as Soul Machines and Synthesia enable brands to experiment with virtual influencers and AI-generated content, offering a unique way to engage with audiences.

While these platforms (and their possibilities) are still very new, the potential has been demonstrated. AI influencers like this are generating 10’s of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis with their content.

Companies are able to invent characters, spokespeople, and even customer mockups for advertising, websites, emails, presentations, and much much more.

This is the biggest frontier of AI that some are already crossing into.

Are you using AI in your business?

2025 is just around the corner and more businesses than ever are using AI to enable their business to get ahead of the competition. Billions of dollars will be made using AI, will you be getting a piece of the pie?