5 Ways AI can Improve Your Business

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is no longer Sci-fi and is being predicted to bring about the next great industrial revolution. AI has already made important contributions to Scientific Research (see AlphaFold as an example), the Military, writing people’s essays for them and beating world champions at Go.

But what actually is it? AI can be defined as:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of intelligent behaviour in computers, allowing them to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. It involves developing systems that can reason, discover meaning, generalize, and learn from past experience.” – ChatGPT 2023

ChatGPT1 is a great example of a powerful AI and we’re seeing how it’s already affecting the workplace and society, other well known AI’s are used in processes such as image recognition, which is already being used in airport security with the eGates.

But how will you be able to use AI to transform your business to reduce costly inefficiencies, improve your profitability, and make your business fit for the future?

1. Automate processes

Some work processes are manually intensive, lengthy, and often mind-numbly boring. No one wants to comb through and extract information from hundreds of documents on a Monday morning. These tasks are often necessary for business to run and are the only way for some businesses to obtain certain information. Yet, these manual processes lower staff moral and take an enormous amount of staff time, computing time, and are prone to errors.

Now, automatic processes with the addition of AI can be used instead. You can program the AI to scan through hundreds of documents to extract specific information, translate documents, summarise those documents and more. On the back of that, using Cloud or Desktop Processes Automation allow you to build workflows that incorporate AI. For example, you can make an automatic process that scans through hundreds of documents each day, extracts key information, then emailing the data in the form of a visual generated from Power BI.

Now, with these AI enhanced automatic processes, staff members like Jane from Accounting can do more value adding work to your business, driving productivity, and profitability.

2. Content Writing and Image Creation

ChatGPT is a powerful AI chatbot that can help you write content for your business. ChatGPT can generate text in various formats, styles, and languages, based on your instructions and preferences. You can use ChatGPT to create blog posts, social media posts, product descriptions, newsletters, emails, and more. ChatGPT can also help you improve your writing skills by giving you feedback and suggestions. Whilst ChatGPT is cutting-edge, it is not perfect and may have some limitations and errors, but it is incredibly quick and often used to generate a first draft or help someone suffering from writer’s block!

For image creation, Open AI’s Dall-E2 can generate images in a variety of formats based on text inputs, which can be particularly useful for Marketing and Design such as creating logos, icons, banners, posters, flyers, and more. Dall-E can also help businesses with their web design, by generating images that fit the theme and layout of their website or create eye-catching and unique images for their products, services, or campaigns.

3. Customer and Staff Service

Chat windows/pop-ups have been around for a while now. However, when using them it’s often abundantly clear whether it is a bot or an actual customer service assistant at the other end of the chat. Now, with advances in Natural Language Learning models such as ChatGPT, chat bots can be used to provide more human-like, chat bots that can offer more accurate, informative and 24/7 customer service. These are also faster to set up than traditional chat bots. Microsoft has recently launched its Power Virtual Agents that uses ChatGPT-based chatbots for businesses to use. Not only can they be used to answer customer queries, but also by staff members to other departments such as finance or HR. Implementing these solutions will cut down customer service and administrative costs.

4. Personal Assistants

If you’ve ever watched Marvel, or many Sci-fi films with AI, there is often a JARVIS or AI assistant for one of the protagonists, scheduling meetings, responding to emails, offering sensible suggestions, and generally making life easier. We’re beginning to see the start of this, Microsoft products are constantly being upgraded to add assistance and soon “Co-Pilots” to offer AI-based assistance to its many array of products. Part of it is already available, with predictive text and other features already being used or the quick response buttons on Teams. These personal assistants will make the day-to-day small tasks go quicker and smoother, freeing up more time to fill with productive work.

5. Security

Ensuring your data is secure is a top priority for businesses. AI is becoming increasingly adept at recognising cyber-attacks and other cyber-threats. One example is Google’s Anti-Money Laundering AI, which detects suspicious patterns in transaction, account, and other financial data to detect possible money laundering activities with a higher detection rate and lower false positive rate than previous systems3.

To Conclude:

We are at the beginning of the AI Industrial Revolution, yet AI has already made huge impacts from Deep Fakes, ChatGPT, to AlphaFold4. AI will continue to change the way we live and work, much like or probably, more impactfully than the internet and will continue to advance at a rapid pace. Businesses are always looking for the biggest competitive advantage, and AI can make your business fit for the future.

Disclaimer: Yes, I did use AI in this article.

If you have any questions or wish to discuss this topic in more detail, then you are more than welcome to contact me with any of the following contact details at the end of this article.