The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) was once alive with the promise of revolutionizing the way businesses function, but early AI often fell short of expectations. From frustrating phone menus with poor speech recognition, to website chatbots that were little more than glorified search engines, to misfiring recommendation algorithms, these early examples of AI in business were, in truth, largely unhelpful and even downright annoying.
Customers often found themselves battling with machine interfaces that seemed almost comically far from intelligent. If you’ve ever bought a TV online, and then within hours received an email from the seller saying “your past purchases have suggested you might want to buy a TV”, you’ll know the limitations that even recent AI usage has bumped up against. It’s been bad news for businesses, who have often found themselves ranting about how Artificial Intelligence was a good name for something that showed very little real intuition.
Fast forward to 2023, and the AI landscape is a far cry from those early days. Today, AI and machine learning are making strides towards what futurists once hoped they could be, offering unprecedented potential for businesses to streamline operations, better serve customers, and foster growth. You can’t have failed to notice the rash of news stories about AI – some of them written by AI – and if you’re wondering how it could make a difference in your business, here are some pointers.
AI: A Powerful Tool for Automating Business Processes
AI, and in particular language models like ChatGPT, have become invaluable in automating complex business processes, often outperforming humans in terms of speed and accuracy. Businesses are using AI to generate code that enables rapid, complicated calculations within spreadsheets, automating significant portions of accounting and record-keeping tasks. This frees up valuable time and resources that can be reinvested into more strategic aspects of the business.
It’s not that AI is doing anything here that can’t be done by humans. It’s just that computers have always been notable above everything else for being good at performing mathematics automatically and at speed. So why wouldn’t you consider asking an AI for tips on how to create a Google Sheet that doesn’t just total up the hours worked by each employee, but also calculates their earnings as a result and even then generates a payslip for them by putting all of that data into a Word Document? If you have ever wondered about the oft-touted benefits of spreadsheets, AI may be what you have needed to unlock those benefits.
The truth of the matter is that if there is a process in your business that you’ve ever wondered about automating, there is an AI way to find out about automating it. All of those workloads that result in deadlines being pushed back and important upgrades being canceled? They can be vastly diminished by consulting with an AI that has the advantage of being able to explain to you how and why its processes work.
The Rise of Intuitive AI Chatbots
One area where AI has truly begun to shine is in the creation of chatbots. If you learn how to build a chatbot using modern AI, you’ll find these tools are becoming increasingly intuitive. Unlike the simplistic chatbots of old, modern AI-powered chatbots can understand customer queries with remarkable accuracy, empowering businesses to provide more precise and helpful responses than ever before. Some would say that isn’t hugely difficult, but it does bear a closer focus.
Chatbots are familiar to anyone who has ever ventured onto a sales website. A small dialog box appears in the corner of the screen with a picture of a generic contact center worker. They brightly say hello, and ask if there is anything they can help you with. Then, if you reply, one of two things tends to happen. Either there is a long, long wait while your query is directed to an actual person who can answer it. More likely, you’re directed to a search result loosely based on what you requested.
If you’ve built a chatbot based on the most recent AI software, though, you can design it so that the AI actually provides a searcher with information that can help them. AI can even detect tone in someone’s words, so if someone comes through the chatbot software to raise a complaint, you can have the bot recite a crafted statement acknowledging their concern, using mollifying language to assure them that their issue is being transmitted to someone with the ability to help. All anyone really wants to know when they raise a complaint is that someone is taking the time to listen to them, and the AI can help here.
AI for Content Creation and Translation
AI has also made strides in content creation and translation. While human writers still take the lead for blogs and timely content, AI can generate simple, readable pages for permanent information, speeding up the process of launching or updating a website. Making sure you have clearly demarcated lines between what you will use the software for, and what you won’t, is the key here. If a customer is simply looking for information about the business, such as its postal address or the list of services it offers, then an AI is more than competent to write that content. It can even make it sound plausibly human and descriptive.
Where AI falls short is in writing to affect the emotions. If you’re writing a review of a movie, for example, you’re always going to be best served writing that yourself or handing over to a film buff who can deliver a suitably stirring piece on James Cameron’s Titanic. A movie fan will write something like: “We all remember how we felt at that moment when Rose says her final goodbye to Jack and he sinks beneath the water”. An AI can’t, because it hasn’t seen the film, can’t remember that moment, and didn’t feel anything. It could probably tell you how many windows were on the ship, though, because an AI is good at counting.
In the realm of translation, AI surpasses services like Google Translate by going beyond literal word-for-word translation. By understanding the meaning of the source document, AI can deliver more accurate and faithful translations, making your content more accessible to a global audience. If, for example, you are looking to create marketing content for a French audience and your opening sentence is “Talk about a stroke of good luck”, a basic translation software might render that as “Parlez d’un coup de chance”, which is a fine literal translation, but literally means “You! Talk about a stroke of luck, right now” – the preferred translation is “Vous parlez d’un coup de chance!”, and an AI will know this and correct for meaning.
Streamlining Operations with AI
AI’s benefits extend beyond customer interfaces and content creation. These are, in fact, very simple things that barely scratch the surface of this technology’s benefits for your business. If you can think of a department within a business, there is a way in which AI can streamline its work and make things more efficient. Once you know the prompts, it is possible to, for example, have an AI read the resumes of two different candidates for a job and say at a glance which of the two meets the person specification for the role. Better yet, as long as you know what to tell it, AI can read multiple candidate resumes and recognize which roles in the company each person would most suit.
That’s one example of where it can be used, but it can also serve in administration to schedule appointments efficiently, and in the accounts department can identify potential cost-saving opportunities, enhancing productivity and profitability. And the difference between this and what AI has been promising for so long (yet failing to deliver) is that it will do all of this without burping out lines of raw data that you yourself will still need to interpret. AI, in 2023, can do the interpreting too and give you the information in a form you understand – in the form of your choice, in fact.
Conclusion: AI as an Enabler, Not a Replacement
It’s important to remember that while AI offers significant benefits, it doesn’t replace the need for humans in a business. Instead, AI allows us to work smarter, minimizing the time spent on repetitive tasks and freeing us up to focus on areas where we can make a dynamic impact.
As we look towards the future, businesses that can effectively harness the power of modern AI will be well-placed to thrive in the increasingly digital world. Better yet, they will be able to shake off the shackles of busy-work that are annoyingly present in most offices in the present day. Having a great designer or salesperson and getting them to perform data entry for hours in a day is like hiring Einstein and getting him to mop the floors. AI will, if used correctly, allow your business to achieve its full creative potential.
Caroline is doing her graduation in IT from the University of South California but keens to work as a freelance blogger. She loves to write on the latest information about IoT, technology, and business. She has innovative ideas and shares her experience with her readers.