When HBR published “How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025,” they noted that “use cases split almost equally between personal and business needs.”
At SymphonyAI, we see things differently. The use cases we support aren’t broad—they’re deeply vertical. We’ve been seeing that magic happens when AI moves out of demos and POCs and deep into real, domain-rooted workflows.
Carla’s AI Moment: Prescriptive Insights and Real Results
Meet Carla, a Senior Category Manager at a $5 billion grocery chain. With BI tools, she could pull last week’s sales trends—but only in hindsight. She still had to interpret charts, juggle disconnected data sources, and decide based on limited data, which promotion to run next.
Enter AI:
- Prescriptive Insights vs. Descriptive Reports
Rather than a backwardlooking snapshot (“iced tea sales were up 2% last quarter”), AI simulates hundreds of whatif scenarios—layering in weather, social sentiment, competitor pricing, and household demographics—to recommend the optimal promotion. In the process, it surfaces opportunities Carla didn’t even know existed and frees her from routine analytics so she can dive into deeper, strategic initiatives.
- Real-Time Adaptation
When a sudden heat wave spikes beverage demand, AI detects the anomaly and automatically adjusts promotion parameters and orders a restock, updating Carla’s dashboard in minutes—no manual rework.
- Natural Language Guidance
Carla doesn’t need to drill into line charts. She asks, “What’s the top promotion for District 7 coming up?” and AI replies, “20% off sparkling water 6-packs, placed in a front-of-store display, is expected to drive $500K incremental sales, rising to $1M if co-funded with CPG partners.”
That shift—from static hindsight to dynamic foresight—lets Carla make smarter moves, adapt in real time, and deliver results that hit the bottom line.
And Carla’s experience is just one example of a broader shift: AI is moving beyond static dashboards and simple chatbots to prescriptive, multi-step workflows that empower teams across every industry. Here’s our view of the most common Vertical AI use cases:
Retail & CPG: Profit-Driven Merchandising
- Automated Planogram Configuration
AI reads point-of-sale trends, local market shifts, and promotional calendars to optimize shelf layouts—lifting revenue per square foot and slashing out-of-stocks.
- Probabilistic Demand Forecasting
What-if simulations factor in seasonality and product cannibalization, cutting forecast error by up to 20%, ensuring the right inventory at the right time.
- Dynamic Promotion Orchestration
End-to-end workflows select the optimal mix of bundles, discounts, and media buys—driving multimillion-dollar uplifts in conversion and basket size.
Financial Services: Scalable Compliance and Payment Fraud Prevention
- High Volume Transaction Screening
Multi-model engines sift through millions of transactions in hours, surfacing true threats and slashing false positives—freeing investigators to focus on critical cases.
- Automated Case Assembly
AI workbenches auto-compile due diligence risk ratings and uncover hidden connections, reducing manual review time by up to 70%.
- Real-Time Fraud Prevention
Real-time anomaly detection in payment flows proactively identifies and blocks suspicious activity, minimizing fraud risk with minimal human oversight.
Industrial: From Reactive to Predictive Maintenance
- Long-Horizon Failure Forecasting
Sensor-driven models spot equipment degradation 30–90 days in advance, averting multimillion-dollar downtime events.
- Vision-Based Quality Inspection
Automated image analysis flags defects only when human review is truly needed—driving inspection costs down and boosting yield.
- Guided Maintenance Workflows
Mobile AI copilots walk technicians step-by-step through repairs, escalating complex issues to specialists in real time.
Smarter Enterprises: From Intelligent Service Desk to Improved Employee Productivity
- Employee Productivity
Agentic workflows handle 40%+ of support requests end-to-end, slashing mean time to resolution and freeing IT teams for strategic work.
- Service Desk Intelligence
AI autotriages incidents—prepopulating priority, assignment, and resolution context—while forecasting SLA breaches to prevent outages before they occur.
- Conversational Knowledge Retrieval
Chat interfaces deliver instant, contextual answers to the authorized set of users—recapturing hours of productivity each week.
HBR’s data confirms the broad interest in Gen AI applications across personal and business contexts. But we believe the real show is vertical, workflow-first AI. It’s already working shoulder-to-shoulder with people like Carla, turning guesses into guaranteed gains. That’s the B2B frontier for AI in 2025—and it’s happening now.
