Do I need AI for my business?
The short answer is no. Despite the AI hype bandwagon, it’s not essential for your business just yet.
That said, it is really good at certain tasks and if you don’t at least explore the possibilities you might be missing out on a useful tool.
The challenge for any business is knowing where AI offers efficiencies and where it can be a waste of time, or worse, a real risk.
There’s a lot of AI hype but it’s not all hype…
There are plenty of big claims being made about how AI will transform your business. No wonder so many are jumping on the bandwagon and then feeling disappointed when the promised improvements don’t materialise. If you tried ChatGPT a few months ago and are now an AI sceptic, I can totally understand.
But… AI is evolving all the time, at a rapid pace, and some of these ‘disappointing tools’ are now several versions on and significantly improved.
For instance, plenty of people were rightly concerned about using their clients’ data with ChatGPT as it was being used to train their AI models. Initially, OpenAI’s measures around data privacy and security were unclear. But now, ChatGPT’s business licence enables you to control how data is used to train the model and you can keep client data out of the picture with your own ring-fenced version of the app. This kind of reassurance opens up more possibilities for responsible use.
AI – some positive business uses
To offer some examples, let me tell you how I use AI.
Image generation
Tools like DAL-E, Canva and Midjourney are incredibly good at generating original images that are easily as good as stock photos. I use them in proposals, and even on client websites regularly in place of generic images. Clients have even asked us how we got the photo, not realising it was AI-generated.
Checking documents
I use ChatGPT to proofread specifications I’ve written for contradictions or missing sections, and to write a summary. Likewise, it’s useful for checking client-supplied documents, suggesting improvements where needed.
For my online posts and other content, ChatGPT is good for summarising the main points and checking that what I intended to say is coming across clearly. These summaries are then useful to get me started on supporting LinkedIn posts or emails (more on this in a future post).
ChatGPT and Perplexity can also save me time by reading and summarising webpages or ebooks – when it finds material I need, I can go back to the source for the detailed information.
Analysing data
I use ChatGPT to check data sets from ecommerce website sales for trends, highlighting best-selling products and categories. The best bit is it will visualise the information as graphs and charts for me.
And just to be clear, what I don’t use ChatGPT for is writing or reading contracts to check if it’s ok for me to sign. Signing up to the wrong contract or clause can carry enormous costs and misunderstandings – ChatGPT isn’t good enough yet to risk saving time here.
Find out for yourself what could work for your business
That’s what works for me; how about you?
If you’ve not tried ChatGPT recently then I suggest giving it a go – I recommend the licenced version; the tools it offers are a huge step up from the free option.
Try it out with a simple task and see how far it gets. It’s worth sticking with it and giving it a few goes at different tasks to see what it is good at and what it’s not so good at. Ask your team to try out different tools for different tasks and see what saves time for your business.
But… “AI can’t help with my work.”
I hear this a lot. I understand that often parts of your work are technical, specialised or need specific knowledge and understanding that AI simply doesn’t have.
To get the best from AI, think of it as an assistant that will get a task started for you, do some research, save you some reading time (e.g. the paid version of ChatGPT can go online and read webpages for you).
If you expect AI to produce a polished output from a one-sentence prompt then you will be disappointed. But if you use it to streamline tasks and help you work more effectively, you’ll be surprised at how much it can help.
Not so much a replacement as an efficiency tool
Start small and simple and build up from there. Definitely check out the paid version of ChatGPT. It’s not expensive and you can cancel after one month if it really doesn’t work out for you. Also, any data you use for training can be kept private.
Ask people in your team or network how they’re using AI. You’ll be surprised how creative some people are being. You can even ask ChatGPT how it can help – the tool itself is surprisingly good at helping you improve your prompting and suggesting new uses. The key is to be clear on what you want it to achieve – use my guide on how to prompt better to improve your results.
If you want to learn more about AI and how to use it better then check out my AI guide. I also find more content like this on my podcast blog and YouTube channel. You can subscribe to receive my Monday marketing motivation email bwlow.
