How to leverage AI in business

Thus far I’ve resisted the temptation to write about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives and in business, until now. I’ve been using AI for almost 12 months now, I’ll explain how I use it later, and there is no doubt that it’s here to stay. Today I want to share with you my own experiences and offer a perspective that I hope will help you embrace AI and the wider use of technology to build greater efficiencies into your business.

The first sweeping statement I’m going to make is this – AI is in no way intelligent. It’s just the application of incredibly fast processing power, brought to bear on publicly available information. AI cannot, at the moment, create anything new, it just trawls every piece of information available globally, and then presents it in a summary format. I have some examples for you later.

With that in mind, where do we begin.

Let’s begin with an example most people have experienced - time. Our time or your time is the most valuable asset that we have, and pouring resources into strategies that don't deliver results can be an expensive use of time. In fact, it's a waste of your time and money. We also know that growing a business is not just about making money, it's about improving the lives of the people we serve. Read my articles on the application of purpose.

AI and technology can save you time, when you know how to use it productively.

Productively doesn’t mean typing a question into the AI platform and copy/pasting the output into your social media – something I see nearly every day - and it’s so easy to spot!

Using AI productively mean using it in the same way you would an intern, for research, for ideas, and for drafting, not for producing the finished product.

Today we're not just talking about how to use AI in your business. I've actually talked to AI about business. As you already know and you're already thinking, this can be quite a polarising topic, depending on who you talk to. Some people see it as a tool for the future. Some see it as job threatening and some see it as potentially harmful to society, you know, the Terminator comes true scenario. What's undeniable is it’s already having an impact on our lives, on our industries and on our businesses. So let's start by talking about the potential of AI in business.

There was a recent article from Forbes that suggested that artificial intelligence can be used to improve decision making for leaders in businesses. As a leader and business owner, you understand the importance of better decision making. We want our decisions to move us forward and not create regret for us or for our businesses. Read more about decision making.

Some people are really excited about the possibilities of AI, and some people are terrified. Some people just don't like that things are changing, and some people don't want to use it because they don't want to do something new. And then some people don't want to use it because they're actually scared of it.

Regardless of how you feel about AI, better decision making is something we can all relate to, no matter where you are in your career or in your life. The more decisions that you are responsible for, the better you want to be at making them. The role AI has in that process is to give you access to a deeper level of information and to allow you to step out of your box and view your next decision from a different perspective. By analysing data from a variety of sources, AI can help leaders identify patterns and trends that they might not have otherwise noticed. Ultimately, it can lead to more informed and strategic decision making, which can have a significant impact on organisational performance.

Using AI is like inviting the whole world into your decision making process.

Rather than just asking one or two other people what they think, you have access to the combined experiences of the whole world through that deeper level of information, which will help you make better informed and more balanced decisions. That's something I think many of us hadn't even considered before.

AI is an enhanced version of Google

Google searching in the past has been great, and it's served its purpose well, but now you have the ability to use AI to collect data and answers and record what you were talking about, even when you revisit it a few days later, a week later, or even a month later. That feature alone can help you build a framework of information that can broaden the scope of your research, which means that your decision making can be better. The ability of AI to record and keep your interactions can be really helpful if you work on multiple projects at once as it’s easy to jump back and forth from project to project. This is a great example of how AI can improve productivity and efficiency.

AI is your intern not your boss

Like many, I started out using AI to just play around with, but I hadn’t systemised its use in my business. I guess it became the latest shinny object to use. Like many, I soon realised that it was just regurgitating the same old information, even if it were presented in a different way. The use of AI in my business, and I believe it should be in yours, is to work out how to use it to make your life more efficient and to improve your ability to work productively and get things done right. Use it as a tool for research and delegate information gathering to it in the same way as you might an intern in your business. Like an intern, it can be helpful in completing tasks, but it relies on your ability to feed it with the right information in order for it to do its job effectively. And it's not quite trustworthy enough to work on its own without oversight. So treat it like an intern, not your boss.

There are many different ways to use AI, my favourite is to use it while I'm brainstorming a project or researching a topic – this article for example - and working with my clients to show them how to brainstorm using AI. As I’ve mentioned already, the ability of the platform to record the history of all my interactions separately really helps me to bounce from one project to another quickly and efficiently, and the information returned builds over time so I can easily scroll back for previous responses, further saving time and building efficiency.

There are clearly positives to the use of AI, but what about the risks

There are risks of course, the first and most obvious I think is industry related. If you have a business or a role that relies on the supply of information or knowledge for a fee, you are or will be under threat unless you adapt. How to do that is beyond the scope of this article but do give me a call if you want to know how.

The next risk is accuracy. You can’t afford to spend time and money on a project that’s based on inaccurate information. I'm an advocate of checking my own work, so I'm certainly not going to allow AI to give me information that I send out into the world without reviewing it. Remember, treat it like an intern not your boss. As I’ve said already, AI generated copy is easy to spot, is it really worth your reputation for the sake of regurgitating the same old information as everyone else. Anecdotally, there is a story of a challenge to a legal case where the defendant relied on an entirely fictious precedent which had been generated by AI. Needless to say, the plaintiff won. The day AI begins telling us what it thinks we want to hear, will be our Terminator day…..

There are many more risks of course, the final point I want to share today is the danger of over reliance on technology to the point where it overrides our judgement or intuition. A point which I think we can all agree is what makes some leaders better than others. There’s also a danger in using AI that you can lose that personal touch, the human connection that we all crave. I was having lunch just a few days ago with one of my clients, and we saw that someone had sent a shout out to someone else in their general Slack channel, it was so clearly written by AI that we both laughed and cried at the same time. Think about this, the words were kind and it was accurate and on point, but we didn't take it as seriously because we knew it wasn’t written by a person taking the time to share their personal feelings. The lesson to learn is if you don't want people to know it was written with AL, don't write it with AI. Or at least go in and edit it heavily and really add your personal touch. Even though the message was real in the sense of it sounded good and it looked good, it still wasn’t as sincere as something that is personal and makes a human connection.

Imagine this – your best friend’s birthday is coming up and you go out to buy a card. You spend time looking through all the well-crafted greetings until you settle on one, perhaps it’s perfect, perhaps it’s as close as you can get to the message you want to share, so you go ahead and buy it. How often, when it comes time to write the card, do you add your own personalised message. I know I do! The messages in these cards are like AI, they may convey the message you want to give but are they truly personal.

Harvard Business Review has this to say about AI. I’m paraphrasing but it said - it's important to remember that AI isn't generating new ideas, it's aggregating and predicting based on prompts. There's no new information, it's just taking all the information from the internet and spitting it back out to you in the way that you want to see it.

A whistle stop tour of Instagram - I think most people are familiar with Instagram or the concept behind it, even if you don’t use it. When Instagram came out, it was all about sharing a picture of your coffee or the sunset or whatever it is with people that they know. That's where the app started. Fast forwarding really quickly… After a few years, these people that we now call influencers decided that they could use this app to make their life look perfect and a whole lot better and successful than they might actually be. So we saw a boom in influencers that were travelling and doing all these fun things which just made their life look like perfection. Not too much later an increasing number of people got tired of perfection. So a few of those influencers said what would happen if I actually started to share my struggles again, what happens if I actually start to lean into the reality of my life. They started sharing their struggles, their anxiety, their issues, the things that were real in life that they were dealing with. Those first influencers became heroes because people crave reality and they crave imperfection.

Bringing this back to the use of AI, I think that as things become perfect, as copy becomes perfect, as marketing becomes perfect, and as strategies become more perfect because they’re based on AI tools, people are going to crave human connection even more, and they're going to crave reality. I’m not saying it needs to be imperfect, of course not, but perhaps it does need to be vulnerable. My point is that if creating perfect copy, perfect images, perfect marketing or perfect strategies through AI becomes too easy, human nature is going to crave something different. We are going to crave reality, we are going to crave the people connection. Without distancing ourselves from new technology, we have to future proof ourselves against AI by cultivating human skills, emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication, things that are so important to the human psyche which AI is going to make seem we don't need quite as much. I really think that's how you can future proof your job regardless of what you do. I see I did circle back and touch on the first risk I mentioned above….. hope it helps.

I said earlier that I would give you some examples by actually asking AI about business.

I started by asking “give me 5 things to do to grow my business”, here’s what it came up with.

1.???? Increase your sales to existing customers

2.???? Attract new customers

3.???? Improve your products and services

4.???? Develop new products and services

5.???? Work with a mentor

There’s a longer description of each and no, I didn’t seed the last one, that’s what it returned. I’ve saved a screen shot of the above in my main blog here.

I hope you can see that there’s nothing new there, and sharing this doesn’t make me more clever or better in any way, it’s just information freely available to you as well as me. What can make it truly useful is to add personal experiences and stories. Yes, I know AI can write stories but are they true. My point being that we crave the human touch which AI cannot provide.

Just to demonstrate a more complex enquiry, I thought it would ask it “what’s my scaling philosophy”, here’s what came back.

“Mark Jarvis is a business mentor, coach, and trainer who helps business owners and leaders to accelerate their growth and scale profitably.?His philosophy about scaling businesses is based on his scaling formula: People x Processes x Planet x Products x Profitability = Sustainable Success.?He believes that growing and scaling a business does not mean it has to be bigger, but it does need to be increasingly profitable.?He also emphasizes the importance of authenticity, relationships, wellbeing, and social responsibility in business.?He offers various programs, courses, and resources to help people grow and businesses scale.”

Again, nothing new. It’s information that’s freely available from my internet presence, the difference is that it’s been re-written in a summary format that it thinks I want to receive.

Google vs AI - By 2004 Google was handling 200 million searches per day and it had revolutionised the way we searched for information. As we know, Google and other search engines index information from the internet and then represent it back to us using our website page titles and meta information, but it’s still a straight copy of what we have already written. When we use Google, we are the ones that have to click the links, find, sort and read the information from each website, blog or resource. AI takes out the middle man by taking out the need for us to find, sort, read and summarise the information. That’s the step that can make us more productive and raise efficiencies in our businesses, and that, for me, is the essence of how to leverage AI in business.

Footnote:

The Microsoft search engine Bing is already using AI (ChatGPT4) in this case, to provide more inclusive and comprehensive results. Here’s the Microsoft marketing speel – “Chat, search and inspiration – all in one place with the new AI-Powered?Bing. Dive deeper into subjects by typing follow up questions to get better answers, faster. Search That Gets You. Your Story, Your Search. The Answer Engine.”

Is this another nail in the coffin of traditional SEO, who knows…. What I do know is that AI is here to stay and how we use it in our lives and businesses without losing the human touch is perhaps the biggest challenge we face.

I’d love to know what you think, ping me a message, and do please talk to me about leveraging AI in your business to support better decision making.

Book a call with me here: https://mark-jarvis.co.uk/scale-up-call/