Here are some tips from our team that will help organize the implementation of artificial intelligence in the work of companies and enterprises.
Whether someone likes it or not, the current state of affairs is such that successful business without AI-based tools is impossible today. Apparently, this trend will last for a long time. Various AI options will become more and more perfect, offering new opportunities. Many futurists predict that in the foreseeable future, at least in this century, AI will reach the infamous “singularity” – a level of development at which it will be equal to or even surpass human intelligence. However, the latter is still a controversial issue.
What is not controversial is that companies, entrepreneurs, and top managers who ignore AI-based tools will quickly and possibly hopelessly lag behind their competitors. So many AI-based tools have already been created and continue to be created that they have penetrated into all areas of business without exception. Therefore, if you hear someone musing on the topic, “No AI is needed in my business,” you can safely assume that this person has thrown in the towel.
However, acquiring AI solutions by itself means nothing. A formal approach to using technology has never yielded good results. Any tool will be truly effective only when used correctly, within the framework of the appropriate culture and philosophy. We believe our tips will help solve this problem.
AI technologies are not a universal solution to all problems. It is very important to understand from the outset that artificial intelligence is not a magic tool like a magic wand, with a wave of which customers and money will flow to you in a turbulent and endless stream. Progress is unlikely to ever create anything like this, as each new twist in progress will create new challenges and tasks. Therefore, from the very beginning, you need to tune yourself and your employees to the fact that AI solutions are nothing more than another type of tools that can increase work efficiency but do not eliminate the need to work.
The main product produced by AI solutions is time. Whatever AI-based tool you use, almost all of them have one common property. Namely, they save (and therefore produce) time. And this applies to all participants in business processes – customers, owners, shareholders, partners, top managers, and ordinary employees. In most cases, this alone justifies the costs of acquiring AI tools, as time is the most valuable and practically irreplaceable resource.
At first glance, what has been said is obvious and even banal. However, let’s look at the situation from a practical point of view. Do top managers who have implemented AI solutions always revise the work format in light of its capabilities? Suppose an employee works 40 hours a week. You have purchased an AI tool that saves 10 hours of their work per week. Have you thought about what to do with the hours saved? We bet that many companies do not even think about analyzing the real time savings from AI technologies and making changes to the workflow accordingly. This leads to a simple piece of advice. After implementing an AI solution in your company, evaluate how much time it has “produced” for you and try to use it rationally.
The use of AI solutions should not lead to employee layoffs but to business scaling. In advertising descriptions of AI solutions, you can often find a mention of such an “advantage” of practical application of artificial intelligence as “reducing personnel costs.” It is difficult to imagine a worse way to “promote” AI solutions. And the problem is not even that such an approach makes many people fear for their jobs, but in its fundamental strategic error. It is well known that successful business is perfected, expanded, and grows. “Optimization through reductions” is a path to nowhere. The correct strategy for implementing AI technologies is to immediately bet on growth and scaling. Instead of “reducing personnel costs,” you should always have ideas ready to assign new creative tasks to employees who have been freed from routine and unproductive work thanks to artificial intelligence.
Do not limit yourself to using only one AI tool. Despite the fact that some services and products claim to be “universal” and many strive for this universalism, developers have done a tremendous amount of work to create specialized AI products. Almost certainly, the most effective solution for businesses, especially medium and large ones, will not be to search for one “universal” AI, but to use an “AI orchestra” of several specialized AI tools.
Develop new business strategies and work formats with AI tools in mind. The usual way of using AI technologies is to “screw” them onto existing work models. This is somewhat reminiscent of the use of steam engines in most fleets during the transition from sail to steam. In those days, it was commonplace to take an ordinary wooden sailing ship and modernize it by installing a steam engine. It took time for the construction of specially designed steamships to become a mass phenomenon. And you understand that such ships did their job much better than a mixture of an old sailboat and a new steamship? Therefore, here’s our advice – when implementing AI technologies, start developing new business strategies and formats immediately, taking into account the possibilities and prospects of AI development.
Organize comprehensive implementation of AI technologies involving employees at all levels. AI solutions will only become truly valuable and effective for a company if all employees are involved in the process of their integration and use. Whatever task you use AI tools for, try to make sure that all departments and areas use them. Involve all employees in discussing what and for what purpose AI products can be used. AI technologies are a relatively new direction, and even their developers do not always have a clear idea of the areas of their application. Give the entire team the opportunity to experiment and offer their integration options. Experience shows that if most of the company treats an AI product as an “incomprehensible fashionable thing that is used (marketers, accountants, salespeople, HRs, market analysts – choose the right one) – you will miss the lion’s share of what you could get thanks to artificial intelligence.
Simultaneous implementation of AI technologies in all areas of a company’s activity, the availability of solutions based on them for both employees and customers, creates a harmonious ecosystem in the company and forms its holistic image. The latter is very important from the point of view of image. Trying to combine new technologies in some areas of activity and leaving outdated solutions in others can easily turn into a curiosity, like some airlines of the first half of the 20th century that used horse-drawn carts with barrels as fuel trucks.
Let AI give work to AI: Today, you can already face an interesting problem. An AI solution performs its work correctly and quickly, but people do not have time to use its results. For example, an AI analyst provides the results of studying arrays of information and their recommendations, but people work slower than AI and do not have time to apply them in their work. What to do? Here’s an obvious solution for you. Let employees “feed” the results of one AI’s work to another. For example, you can give the results and conclusions of the aforementioned AI analyst to a universal AI based on a large linguistic model and suggest developing ways to use this information in practice. The main thing is to formulate the task clearly and unambiguously.
In connection with the above, it should be noted that such a style as conducting and managing different AI systems will apparently become one of the most popular formats of work in all types of business in the very near future. And not only in business.
Good luck and high income to everyone!
