AI and your Business. No matter what the media is that you get information from, you cannot escape the mention of AI and the wonderful things it is bringing to business.
“How AI helps small business” created by deepdreamgenerator
If you are a Founder or Senior Executive in a company that is not in the Tech field, you are probably thinking: Just how important is AI to my business? What do I miss if I ignore it, or what do I gain if I try to use it? Most importantly, what will be the consequences of making the wrong choice?
I will attempt to provide you with a simplified overview of what may happen if you either ignore AI for your company or explore and apply the AI to your current situation.
What are your Options?
Ignoring AI, in my opinion, is not an option regardless of your business size, product or service. The advantages offered by AI, including free AI tools should not be ignored. As an example, it is possible today, to have voice-mail prompts that do not drive your customer into rage simply by using AI.
What is AI?
In short AI is using computing power to analyze data and provide insights on patterns that may be occurring in your business. You can exploit these patterns to solve problems such as reasons for parts failures or for forecasting demand of an item.
The problem is that AI needs to be trained on very large sets of data. Most businesses do not individually create enough data to train AI. If you are Fortune 500 company, you are probably frantically working on implementing or already using AI. So what should you do if you do not have the resources or are not creating enough data to have your own AI? It is clear that AI is bringing a significant competitive advantage to companies that are already using it and since you are not, you are falling behind.
How can I use AI now?
The market place has come up with a solution. AIaaS (AI as a Service) has become a reality. With companies such as Amazon Machine Learning , Microsoft Cognitive Services (Azure) and Google cloud offering free entry into the AI space, there is no excuse for not exploring using AI for your business.
What is even more interesting is that more and more 3rd party companies are offering AI applications you can use immediately.
My favorite (and it was not used for this blog) is Jasper – a service for creating unique social media content. If you have a new website that needs content, Jasper will help you or your staff create articles that are based on the key words you provide. While you may need to edit the text, it is better than writing 25 blog posts from scratch.
Another tool is Dall-E from Google that you can use to create images. The two images below were created by Dall-E and myself just minutes ago. The information I gave the AI was company logo for https://z-niche.com/ plus modern and experience. These were just the initial output and I could have continued to iterate, but since I only wanted a quick example, I stopped there.
“Z Niche Logos” created by openai.com
Very different from the logo we actually use, but I was impressed! Here is a list of the top AI text to image generators.
Other applications available right now as a AIaaS are AI enabled CRMs and AI enabled Chatbots for both your website and your telephone answering system. There are new tools coming out daily and it is worth your time to keep an eye on this important space.
Summary
No matter what your product or service is or how small or large your company is, as the Founder or the CEO you must consider using AI. Not considering AI will put your company on the path for extinction.
Fortunately, even the most serious evaluation of AI will not cost you an arm and a leg.
“How AI helps small business” by deepdreamgenerator
Have Fun!