What is Generative AI? A Practical Guide for Businesses

It feels like you can’t scroll through a news feed or sit in a team meeting these days without someone mentioning "generative AI." Thanks to tools like ChatGPT, it’s shot from a niche tech concept to a mainstream buzzword. But beyond all the hype, what does it actually mean for your business?

Honestly, generative AI is a lot more than a fun tool for writing poems or creating strange images. It’s a technology that’s genuinely changing how companies handle customer support, manage their internal knowledge, and automate the tedious parts of their day. This guide will cut through the noise and give you a practical look at what generative AI is, how you can use it, and what to watch out for when you’re picking a platform for your team.

What is generative AI?

Let’s break it down. At its core, generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create completely new and original content. It doesn’t just analyze or sort data that’s already there; it makes something new from scratch.

This video provides a concise explanation of what generative AI is and how it creates new content.

Here’s an analogy: traditional AI is like a weather app. It looks at historical data and current conditions to predict that it’s going to rain. It’s making a forecast based on existing patterns. Generative AI, on the other hand, is like a songwriter who, inspired by that forecast, writes a brand-new song about an approaching storm. It’s not just predicting; it’s creating.

So, how does it pull this off? These AI models are trained on gigantic amounts of data, think huge chunks of the internet, a company’s internal documents, or years of past customer conversations. By sifting through all this information, the model learns the underlying patterns, styles, and connections. When you give it a prompt, like "answer this customer’s question" or "summarize this document," it uses its training to generate a response that makes sense in that context.

How businesses are using generative AI (and where they get stuck)

Generative AI isn’t some far-off concept; teams are already using it to solve real-world problems. But for every success story, there’s a team that’s wrestled with a clunky, complicated, or just plain unhelpful tool. Let’s look at a few key areas where it’s making a difference.

Improving customer support and experience

What people are doing with it:

• 24/7 AI Chatbots: Giving customers instant answers on your website or in your app, no matter the time of day.

• AI Agent Assist (Copilots): Drafting accurate, on-brand replies for human agents, which they can quickly review and send. This speeds up response times and helps new agents get comfortable much faster.

• Ticket Summarization: Automatically creating short summaries of long, complicated customer conversations so agents can get the gist without reading pages of messages.

An illustration of a generative AI copilot drafting a response within an email client to assist a support agent.

Where things usually go wrong:

The biggest headache for most businesses is the setup. Many AI platforms require months of complex configurations, custom coding, and developer hours just to get a basic bot up and running. Often, you’re left with a generic AI that doesn’t understand your company’s products or tone of voice, leading to some pretty frustrating customer experiences. Training these bots is typically a slow, manual process of feeding them question-and-answer pairs.

Modern platforms like eesel AI have a different approach. Instead of manual training, eesel connects directly to your helpdesk and learns from your team’s past ticket resolutions and your existing help center articles. This means you can go live in minutes, not months, with an AI that already speaks your language and understands your business.

Streamlining internal knowledge and employee support

What people are doing with it:

• Internal Q&A: Letting employees get instant answers to their questions in Slack or Microsoft Teams. No more tapping a colleague on the shoulder to ask about HR policies, IT issues, or where to find the latest project brief.

• Onboarding: Giving new hires one reliable place to find information, helping them get up to speed without feeling overwhelmed.

A generative AI assistant providing an instant answer to an internal question directly within Slack.

Where things usually go wrong:

Most companies have their knowledge scattered across dozens of different apps. The sales team lives in Google Docs, engineering is in Confluence, and HR keeps policies in a totally separate portal. The issue is that most AI tools can’t connect to all these different sources, leaving them with huge blind spots and an inability to answer questions accurately.

This is where having a unified platform is a must. eesel AI was built to solve this exact problem, with over 100 one-click integrations that pull all your scattered knowledge together. By connecting tools like Confluence, Google Docs, and Slack, you can create a single, trustworthy source of truth for your internal AI assistant.

Automating workflows and daily tasks

What people are doing with it:

• AI Triage: Automatically looking at incoming support tickets or IT requests to tag, route, and prioritize them without a human having to touch them.

• Data Entry: Pulling key information from an email or chat (like a customer’s name or order number) and using it to update fields in your helpdesk or CRM.

A workflow diagram showcasing how generative AI can automate the process of handling and routing support tickets.

Where things usually go wrong:

A lot of AI tools offer automation, but it’s often a "black box." The rules are rigid, and you have very little visibility or control over what the AI decides to do. This can be pretty risky. What if the AI misunderstands a ticket and closes it by mistake, or sends an urgent issue to the wrong team?

The best tools give you full control over the process. For instance, eesel AI’s workflow engine is completely transparent. You can choose exactly which types of tickets the AI handles (like password resets or shipping inquiries) and set up custom actions for it to take. Everything else gets passed to a human, so you can automate the simple stuff with peace of mind.

What to look for in a generative AI platform

Jumping into generative AI can feel like a lot, but focusing on a few key things can help you find a tool that actually helps your team instead of creating more headaches.

How long will a generative AI platform take to set up?

Most enterprise AI vendors drag you through a long, painful sales process. You have to sit through mandatory demos, negotiate complicated contracts, and then wait weeks or even months for a professional services team to get you set up. The time it takes to see any value is just way too long.

Look for a platform that’s truly self-serve. You should be able to sign up, connect your tools, configure your AI, and see it working without ever having to talk to a salesperson (unless you want to, of course).

This workflow shows the simple, self-serve implementation process of a modern generative AI platform.

That’s why eesel AI was designed to be radically simple and self-serve. You can create an account, connect your helpdesk with a single click, and launch a basic AI assistant in about five minutes. No demos, no sales calls, no waiting around.

How much control do I have with generative AI?

A generic, one-size-fits-all AI can do more harm than good. If it starts responding in a tone that doesn’t match your brand or answering questions it shouldn’t, you risk damaging the trust you’ve built with your customers.

You’ll want a tool that gives you:

• A powerful prompt editor that lets you define the AI’s personality, tone, and when it should escalate to a person.

• The ability to "scope" the AI’s knowledge, limiting it to certain documents or topics for different situations.

• Support for custom actions, which let the AI do more than just answer questions, like looking up live order information from Shopify or creating a ticket in Zendesk.

An example of the customization settings in a generative AI platform, allowing users to define specific rules and guardrails.

With eesel AI, you get total control through its customizable workflow engine. You define exactly how your AI behaves, what it’s allowed to know, and what actions it can take, making sure it’s always a helpful and on-brand part of your team.

Is my data safe with generative AI?

One of the biggest worries with generative AI is data privacy. What’s happening with your sensitive company and customer data? Some AI models might use your data to train their general models, which is a huge security risk.

Look for a company with a clear and explicit policy stating that your data will never be used to train anyone else’s models. Your data should be kept isolated and secure, and the vendor should be working with trusted, SOC 2 Type II-certified partners.

We take this very seriously. With eesel AI, your data is only used to train your bots, and no one else’s. All data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, is isolated for each customer, and is handled by trusted partners who meet the highest industry security standards.

How to measure the impact of generative AI

Once you’ve found a tool that feels right, how do you justify the cost and measure its impact? It starts with understanding the pricing and having a risk-free way to test its performance.

Understanding hidden costs and unpredictable pricing

Many AI vendors use a "per-resolution" or "per-ticket" pricing model. This sounds reasonable at first, but it creates a weird incentive: the better your AI gets and the more tickets it handles, the higher your bill gets. You’re basically punished for being successful.

Look for transparent and predictable pricing. A flat-rate monthly or annual fee based on the features and capacity you need is ideal. This way, you can budget properly and you’re never surprised by a massive bill after a busy month. Flexible monthly plans are another good sign, as they show the vendor is confident you’ll want to stick around.

Pricing Model	How it Works	The Downside
Per-Resolution	You pay for every ticket the AI successfully closes.	Unpredictable costs that grow with your support volume. Penalizes you for success.
Per-Interaction	You pay for every message the AI sends or action it takes.	Can get expensive for conversational bots or complex workflows. Still highly variable.
Flat-Rate / Tiered	You pay a fixed monthly or annual fee for a set capacity.	Predictable and transparent. Your costs are stable, and you’re not punished for growth.

The pricing for eesel AI is transparent and predictable. Our tiered plans are based on usage capacity and never charge per resolution. This allows you to scale your support operations without worrying about surprise costs.

How to test and deploy generative AI without any risk

How can you be sure an AI will actually perform well before you let it loose on your customers? Launching a faulty AI can lead to a terrible customer experience and hurt your brand’s reputation.

The best platforms have a robust simulation or sandbox mode. This feature lets you test the AI on your historical data, showing you exactly how it would have responded to thousands of real customer tickets from the past. It gives you an accurate forecast of its performance and what you could save.

The simulation mode in eesel AI shows how a generative AI model would perform on past customer tickets before deployment.

This is one of our most powerful features. eesel AI includes a powerful simulation mode that lets you safely test your entire setup on thousands of your past tickets. You can review the AI’s responses, see its projected resolution rate, and calculate your potential ROI before a single customer ever interacts with it.

Making generative AI work for you

Generative AI really could change how you do business, freeing up your team to focus on more important work while delivering a better experience for your customers and employees. But success isn’t about just picking any tool; it’s about picking the right one.

The best generative AI platforms aren’t just powerful on paper. They are simple to set up, give you complete control over the experience, and are totally transparent about their pricing and performance. They let you start small, test with confidence, and scale at your own pace.

Ready to see what generative AI can do for your business, without all the complexity and risk? Try eesel AI for free and launch your first AI assistant in minutes.