The AI edge: Why your business can't afford to ignore it

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries and redefining how businesses operate. From automating tasks to assisting decision-making, AI offers tremendous benefits. However, many companies are struggling to keep up with the rapid advancements. Richard Muscat Azzopardi explores the right and wrong ways to integrate AI tools, ensuring you stay competitive.

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Richard Muscat Azzopardi

It's becoming harder and harder to ignore AI in your business. If you use any sort of software, the likelihood is that it's currently integrating some form of generative AI. Even fridges and microwaves inject AI into their software, let alone your favourite software.

It's a great time to be alive, and it's fascinating to see all the benefits we're reaping from AI tools, but it can also be scary.

How do you keep up? How do you know which tool to use? How do you discuss the tools you're using with your clients? How do you control what your employees are doing on AI?

There's no easy answer.

However, I can almost guarantee that your peers are asking most of these questions, so don't think you're the only one perplexed.

Before getting into some specific advice, however, I just want to give one warning: Don't assume this will just go away. This is not the metaverse, AR and VR, or 360-degree videos. Their time may still come, but they exploded onto the scene before the world was ready. AI is here today and here to stay, and its transformational effects on businesses are profound.

While I don't think you'll lose your job (or your clients) to AI just yet, I am pretty sure you'll lose your job (or your clients) to a company leveraging AI better than you are.

It's just no comparison. It's like living through the Industrial Revolution and ignoring the automation of manufacturing. Sure, there's still room for small-scale artisans, but the people with big machines will always outgun anyone manufacturing manually.

Proper ways to implement AI tools

The first thing to consider when considering AI tools and technology is that these tools help you do your job better or more efficiently. You should look for areas of your business that could be assisted with automation or making sense of large swathes of data. In general, some AI tools can probably help with any task that is highly process-driven and repetitive.

I'm not going to cover many examples of good ways to use AI because most of the tools that make your life easier are industry-specific, but if you go over the few examples I've chosen below, you can see the thought process.

Help with research

Most of our work requires a deep understanding of the industry we're working in with our clients. AI tools can be invaluable for quickly getting up to speed with industries, markets, or areas of specialisation. This can be true for any industry; I can't think of any industry in which a better understanding of your industry will not prove useful.

It's also an excellent way to learn more about other roles within your company. Especially as a business leader, if you can learn to leverage AI tools well, you can ask far better questions about your more technical reports.

Help with decision-making

Suppose you have large swathes of data or much information about a specific subject. In that case, AI is an excellent way to make sense of it all, query it, and help collect all the background information you need to decide on something. Think about the benefit you could extract from dumping all your meeting notes about a subject or all the historical data from something into one large dataset and having the ability to query it in easy-to-understand human commands.

Help with automation of repetitive tasks

AI is excellent at helping with repetitive tasks. Think of transcribing voice notes, for example. Or recognising text and handwriting in large volumes. These are tasks that an AI tool can do in minutes, which a human can do in days or weeks. If you can describe the process well, you can probably find someone to leverage existing AI tools to do the job for you.

Help with time management

One of our favourite tools at Switch is Clockwise, a calendar tool that saves us hours every week to find time in our schedules. It also looks at your individual calendar and optimises it to give you more focus time. You can always override its suggestions manually, but the benefit of using it has been massive for us.

Help with customer service

Suppose you have a good enough description of all the standard queries you usually get with customer support. In that case, teaching an AI tool to answer customer queries online is relatively easy. This won't replace human interactions when needed, but AI can offer an amazing customer experience if it can solve most customer queries in seconds. Your customers can get much better service if most of their queries are answered quickly.

Wrong ways to implement AI tools

There are many more ways to leverage AI tools than the ones I covered above, and I'd be happy to discuss them in more detail if you contact me at any point. But I'm even more concerned about people looking at AI tools and seeing them in the wrong light. Just like they can be extremely helpful, they can also be extremely dangerous (or downright stupid).

To save on HR costs

This is more of a question of approach than of actual implementation. If you're looking at AI tools to reduce your HR costs, you're probably looking at it from the wrong perspective. Yes, by looking at the massive layoffs that big tech companies are making, you might be inclined to think that AI is definitely going to help with savings, but that's just missing the woods for the trees. Big tech companies are laying off people from non-AI areas because it's a business decision to focus on AI tools, not because AI tools are replacing humans. In most cases, they had overhired for growth and are actually now just doubling down on AI solutions instead, clearing out people from other divisions.

AI tools still need humans to make sense of them, and if you think otherwise, you'll be very disappointed.

To make decisions on your behalf

AI tools are excellent at helping you make sense of information to make better decisions. Still, they should not be relied on to make decisions themselves (at this point in time), especially with more generic tools. AI tools can help you make better decisions in specialised scenarios. But don't use AI tools to make decisions on your behalf when screening CVs or figuring out who to hire or fire, for example. Don't rely on generic AI tools to tell you where to invest or where to spend your money. Use them to gather and make sense of information, but you should be the ultimate decision-maker.

To produce content on your behalf

I've seen so much obviously AI-generated content that it's scary. It's even worse when the person generating the content is not even bothered to learn how to prompt well or make sense of the content being output. I recently received an email from a potential supplier who very obviously just asked ChatGPT to write an email to help sell me something. The email could be seen as a ChatGPT effort from miles away, and what made it even worse was that the context of the email made no sense, so if the person sending the email had even bothered for a minute or two to read the email they were sending out, they'd have smelt a rat before sending it.

Think about the content you're putting out there on behalf of your brand. Think about what your audience thinks of you. If you rely on a tool to create your content, at the very least, take the time to learn how to prompt well and edit your content to make it make sense. By the time you do that, you can probably have produced the content yourself.

And in the end...

There are hundreds of ways to use AI to get ahead of the game (or, at the very least, to not be left behind). Not all of them are good. Not all of them will offer you a real advantage.

Think about the sustainability of your decisions, learn as much as you can about the tools available, stay up to date, and keep an open mind.

It might seem scary, mainly because there's so much happening at any given time, but trust me, it's just as exciting as frightening. You'll be a convert once you start seeing the real benefits of finding tools to take the boring bits of your work away.

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