There is plenty of talk about AI in the business world, specifically around how powerful it can be for organisations.
If you’re a business owner, you’ve likely heard about AI already. However, reluctance towards AI remains, largely stemming from uncertainty, a lack of understanding of the benefits and an inability to determine specific use cases.
But the rumours are true: AI can revolutionise your business, if you apply it correctly.
Our Chief Innovation Officer, Tristan Shortland, discusses how you can leverage AI in your business to gain a competitive advantage, drive performance and generate profit.
What is AI?
AI has been around for a long time. Fundamentally, it’s a computer behaving in the way that a human would.
Many people already use AI without realising. We’re used to things like Netflix recommendations, smart speakers like Amazon Alexa, virtual assistants like Siri, and autonomous driving in cars. We take these for granted in day-to-day life, but they’re all applications of AI that we use day in, day out.
The recent hype around AI mainly relates to generative AI and natural language processing. These two technologies combined give us a new way to interact with computers, so we can speak to them in human language and they’ll understand. They’ll understand the context behind the question that we’re asking.
The generative AI element is the ability for the technology to generate new content, whether that’s tables, text, images or something else.
Together, these things can fundamentally change how we interact with computers.
Productivity AI_
There are two core ways to use AI, and at Infinity Group, we call the first productivity AI.
It’s available to everyone, and it helps with things like content generation – whether that’s social post proposals, pitch decks and so on. You can also use it to research topics, find information, answer specific questions around legislation or terms and conditions, summarise bodies of text and pick out key points.
Productivity AI doesn’t necessarily have a USP for your business, as everyone with a licence has got access to the same tools and capabilities. Instead, the way to use them to gain a competitive advantage for your business is to create a workforce that embraces that technology to increase efficiency and shortcut processes. Successfully adopting AI as an organisation before your competitors do will allow you to perform better.
Differential AI_
The other side of the coin is differential AI. This is when you use AI on proprietary data, which belongs to you and only you. As such, it’s easier to use it to gain a competitive advantage.
Every business now has a vast amount of data. They’re generating new data all the time, whether that’s through sales, operations, manufacturing or other functions, depending on your industry.
This data can be monetised in a number of ways to give you a competitive edge. You can use AI tools for trend detection, outcome prediction, assessing customer behaviour and buying patterns or optimising your supply chain. These tools are all available in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
With more advanced AI tools, there are endless possibilities for putting AI to work with your data. This will then differentiate you from the competition, using your owned data, with AI powering innovation and transformation.
Some example scenarios of how you can use AI with your data include building intelligent chat bots for internal use, such as answering HR questions or responding to tenders. You can also create customer facing bots for self-service, such as customer support or finance enquiries.
You can do advanced data analysis to process much larger data volumes, quicker than any human can. On top of this, you can take a large body of data and identify trends and detect sentiment, process documents or predict outcomes based on complex data sets.
All these things can give you a competitive advantage that that no one else has. That, combined with the productivity AI tools that are out there, will really give you an edge and accelerate your business.
Encouraging your employees to experiment with AI_
The most successful organisations have created an environment where employees are free to experiment with AI. This means building a business case and gathering high impact use cases from a diverse range of staff across the business.
When these projects are constrained to IT-only initiatives, we see they’re kept within technical teams. Often, opportunities for improvement across different departments can be missed.
Every department and every individual within the business might apply AI in a slightly different way and find unique use cases. So, it’s important that we include a diverse range of stakeholders in any initiative.
At Infinity Group, we created what we call an AI advocacy group that brought together across departmental teams to meet regularly and come up with ideas for how AI could improve things. These ideas were captured, with some of them turning into AI projects we piloted. These include department-specific chat bots. We then turned all that data into a business case for launching AI enabled initiatives.
And we now offer the same service to our customers. We’ll help facilitate an AI working group that gets the right people together and foster a culture of curiosity. We’ll also identify ways to improve processes across the entire business, whilst building a quantifiable business case and tracking ROI.
At the same time, we’ll work with IT teams to ensure that the data quality and security is in place, that the infrastructure is ready and there’s good communication to drive adoption.
How to implement AI_
Fundamentally, the implementation of AI can’t be seen a one-off project. It’s not something that you start, implement and finish – it’s a cultural shift. It’s a new way of working with technology. You need to learn how to interact with a computer, and the technology is changing rapidly and bringing new use cases all the time.
You need to really to work out what AI can mean for you, with a structured approach to ongoing innovation and the right support from someone like Infinity Group.
If you’re interested in understanding how AI can benefit your business, or creating an AI working group within your organisation, get in touch.
