The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the future of work cannot be overstated. ChatGPT, the “fastest-growing consumer application in history,” is just one example of how AI is becoming more than just a source of entertainment and integrated into various aspects of our lives.
Is Your Business Ready for AI?
The extent of using AI to perform various types of work that were previously only possible for human workers, now raises the question of whether or not businesses are ready for this kind of change. But the fact is that as AI continues to become more advanced, businesses need to be prepared for the ways it may affect their operations. This means implementing new technologies, investing in training for employees, and exploring new ways of working that can take advantage of the many benefits that AI has to offer.
A Wake Up Call for Businesses
A recent report on generative AI by Forrester tells its enterprise clients not to ignore or downplay its impact. It highlights the importance and opportunities it presents for businesses, particularly in augmenting and automating existing work processes in IT, marketing, customer service and other business functions.
As per the report, generative AI can create new content effortlessly by utilising data like text, images, videos and audio. As such, businesses that are reluctant to adopt it run the risk of missing out on all sorts of opportunities.
The report suggests that businesses should begin experimenting with generative AI to optimise their existing processes. The benefits of which goes well beyond content creation.
Businesses can accelerate the speed and accuracy of app development and data science practices, and artificial data created by generative AI can be used to train AI models more effectively. Not embracing this technology could mean that businesses are missing out on new security opportunities, too.
Moving to a Generative AI Era
Since the PR stunt on 30 November 2022 that made ChatGPT publicly available (that some people are labelling as “B.G.” (Before Generative AI)), we are now living in the new, exciting and somewhat frightening G.A (Generative AI) era. According to Forbes, this is a time “where executive FOMO could lead to embarrassing public failures (as in Google, that started paying attention to G.A. already in 2017, losing $100 billion in market value in one day).”
AI-powered systems are increasingly present in the world around us, often in subtle ways, and AI is generally becoming more common and accessible to individuals and businesses alike. We can already see it taking over social media through examples like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, so once we get past asking ChatGPT for jokes and posting selfies, AI has enormous potential to change the way we work forever.
Using AI in Business Today
As you look for the right AI solutions for your business, a trusted IT partner (like Debouge Tech) can make all the difference to helping ensure that your IT systems are secure, solid, and scalable enough to handle the demands of AI, as well as for identifying the best AI technologies to achieve your business goals.
Here are just a few of the ways that Debouge Tech and IT providers like us can help you use AI to revolutionise your business operations today:
Chatbots
Chatbots have been around for years but as AI is advancing it is being used to build chatbots for increased customer engagement in marketing. These chatbots are made using natural language processing (NLP) to help with quick problem-solving, lead nurturing, and answering repeated questions.
Chatbots that use AI can personalise the customer journey while they consume marketing content and answer their questions. A good example of this is Drift‘s chatbot which is trained to answer questions outside of its pre-programmed path so that if a customer has a question that isn’t already in the system, they can still get an answer.
Business communication
Like the abovementioned Chatbots, AI-powered bots are not just limited to conversational marketing, they can also help with scheduling appointments (using AI meeting schedulers), setting/sending notifications and reminders, handling bookings, or leading basic employee training.
One of our favourite workflow management automation tools that our clients use is Monday.com (for no-code project management workflows) and we’ve found that Zapier is a game-changer for streamlining operations and automating workflows by using it to integrate web applications you already use.
Here’s an example of how you can use OpenAI and Zapier to automatically draft emails that reply to messages you receive. Just one word of warning: read them before you click send!
Automated processes
AI-powered automation is a solution that many companies have turned to. After all, the ability to streamline and automate recurring tasks is revolutionary for the ability to apply machine learning mechanisms to create a system that saves time, improves services, and makes employees more productive.
Regardless of the process, automation can be applied to any repetitive and predictable sequence of steps to create an efficient workflow – from simple data entry tasks to complex decision-making processes. Basically, as long as it consists of a sequence of repetitive, predictable steps, we can automate it by leveraging AI and Machine Learning (ML) mechanisms.
AI has been the subject of many complex and ongoing discussions about its potential impact to the information security community and cybersecurity landscape on the whole. There are a lot of options out there as cyber security and tech providers jump on the buzzword bandwagon and claim to use Artificial Intelligence in different ways.
Whilst we recommend approaching slowly and with caution, we are currently working with SentinelOne, a leader in autonomous cybersecurity and a Forbes AI 50 company, who use AI within their product development.
Their new SentinelOne Singularity™ cybersecurity AI platform is specially designed to detect, prevent, and respond to cyber attacks at machine speed, thereby empowering organisations like yours to better secure your endpoints, cloud workloads, containers, identities, and mobile and network-connected devices with speed, accuracy and simplicity.
Watch this space for more on this in future…
Content generation
AI and tools like GPT-3 can now generate text that appears to be written by a human to help create content like captions, posts for social media, subject lines for emails, and blog copy. Using a service like Jasper, it can even be used for longer form content like website copy and articles. The issue is how effective it is depends on the kind of content you’re creating and the prompts you give it.
Another important thing to note with AI-generated content is that it still needs to be edited before being published. For this reason, just as we’ve done to create this article, most marketers today use it to recommend content and generate ideas for articles, before fact-checking, editing, and adjusting the writing to make it sound more human.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
With AI having become a core component of major search engine algorithms, including Google’s Rankbrain and BERT, having knowledge of AI and how it works in search engines is instrumental to enhancing your web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics.
With the help of AI, you can track and assess the latest trending topics and patterns in the market to stay ahead of the competition by identifying the keywords you should be targeting and plugging your content gaps accordingly.
Content optimisation is still very much about keywords, links, and other on-page SEO tactics but search engines now look at more than just those indicators as they are concerned about precisely what the searcher’s intent is while searching. This is where AI-enabled tools like the new Google Analytics 4 come in to make data analysis quicker, easier, and more efficient, so that you can learn about your audience’s preferences and customise content to match their interests.
AI doesn’t end at helping optimise content for search engines. AI-powered writing tools like Atomic Reach, Hemmingway and Grammarly (among many others) also help ensure your writing makes for a pleasant read to help increase dwell time, which is another factor that search engines score highly using it as an indicator that visitors find your content useful.
The bottom line is AI can help you create better optimised content that your readers will love and engage with, so by integrating those tools into your SEO process you can better optimise content, keyword research, and multiple-page ranking analysis for improved performance and ROI.
Next steps
There are plenty of warnings and clear reasons why we should be cautious about AI. Not least because almost every major AI product is trained on content scraped from the internet which causes it to have some dangerous biases. You don’t need to look far for proof. Just look at how Amazon accidentally created a sexist hiring AI, and how Tesla’s autopilot feature continues to crash cars!
Current AI business tools may not replace humans, but they can certainly help us increase the speed at which we produce certain things. And whilst we need to be mindful of the threats, there are also an increasing number of opportunities for us to explore.
With so many different ways to leverage AI in business, it can be hard to know where to start. We recommend talking to IT experts like us at Debouge Tech to work together with you to fully understand your business needs and help you find the right technology to not only increase productivity and efficiency but accelerate business growth using your IT as a strategic advantage.
Get in touch by calling us on 01908 736 717 or by emailing [email protected] to understand how AI applies to your business. We’re always happy to help.