Is Your Business Ready For AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries, offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth, and efficiency. AI tools have quickly become easy to use, powerful, and readily accessible to pretty much everyone. But using AI to grow your business can be costly, and companies often find it difficult to measure the return on investment.
Before diving headfirst into AI though, it's important to assess your business's readiness. Here are a few important questions to help guide your AI journey:
1. Do you have a clear vision of your goals for implementing AI?
Are you aiming to automate tasks, enhance customer experiences, or gain a competitive edge through data-driven insights? A clear vision will help make your AI investment more strategic and your returns on the investment easier to measure.
2. Do you have a solid data foundation?
AI thrives on high-quality data. Evaluate your data for completeness, accuracy, and accessibility. If your data is scattered or inconsistent, prioritize data cleaning and organization before jumping into AI. As the ancient saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out"!
3. Is Your technology infrastructure ready?
AI applications can demand significant computational resources. Evaluate your hardware, software, and network capabilities to make sure they can handle AI workloads. Consider upgrading your infrastructure or exploring cloud platforms like Salesforce that provide powerful AI business solutions right out of the box.
4. Have you considered all related costs?
While AI can deliver impressive results, the upfront and ongoing investment can be significant. These costs include the AI tools, development and integration, data management, employee training, and potential IT upgrades. If you're thinking about training your own Large Language Model (LLM), that's a significant investment as well. Training a large model can cost millions of dollars, mostly due to GPU costs. Smaller, specialized models cost a bit less, but still require major investments in data preparation, human feedback, infrastructure, and hosting.
5. How will you empower your workforce?
AI is a tool to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. Equipping your team with the skills to effectively collaborate with AI systems is a great way to grow your internal AI capabilities, maximize the return on your technology investments, and create a culture of innovation and growth by addressing employees' natural concerns about job security.