What will your company do with artificial intelligence, now that it’s a key technological trend? Artificial intelligence (AI, for short) holds the potential to revolutionize how your business meets its goals. Fueled by the natural language model of generative AI, automation of processes, data analysis, and streamlining tasks have all helped businesses work more efficiently. Read on to learn more about specific use cases for different aspects of your business.

Multiple Use Cases for Artificial Intelligence

With AI working behind the scenes to automate tasks, and the release of ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, new capabilities and use cases have opened up–content generation, development of artwork, and other creative applications are available. Microsoft also entered the picture by integrating Co Pilot with their popular office productivity suite in early 2023. Use cases are plentiful for C-level staff, operations, sales and marketing, human resources and more.

C-Level Executives: More business data is generated daily, and harnessing it can be overwhelming. Artificial intelligence can analyze data and distill insights from it in a way that mere human effort cannot match. Market trends, customer behavior, and financial metrics can all be derived from the vast amounts of data a business generates, as well as internet content. Moreover, they might get ideas for ways other departments can use AI.

Financial: Finance Departments can use AI for document search and synthesis, enabling them to understand contract information and regulatory filings. Artificial intelligence can also analyze and synthesize transactional data, identifying anomalies that might indicate possible fraud. Automated bots can perform mundane data entry and reconciliation tasks. Financial analysts realize productivity gains by using AI to set up complex spreadsheets for financial analysis.

Human Resources: AI can help streamline recruiting to help your company search out the ideal candidate, simplify documentation for on-boarding, and gather employee feedback to improve their experience. Big data from large language models (LLMs) can help your human resources department make informed decisions and also streamline benefits and compensation. AI is also ideal for creating job descriptions.

Operations: Drawing up meeting agendas and synthesizing insights from meeting notes; automatically inviting attendees, summing up information for attendees arriving later; preparing timelines for rollouts of new products.

Sales/Marketing: AI can be used to prepare for an upcoming meeting by summarizing emails and researching customer information from internal systems.  AI can also help with generating proposals, creating powerpoints and more.

Customer Service: AI can help customer service representatives quickly pull up customer data; summarize interactions, prompt for next best answers and empower live chat to enhance customer experience.

With all of these benefits, be sure to use AI responsibly and securely in your organization.  Ensure you have an acceptable use policy and train your employees properly. In addition, identify and tag sensitive information to avoid unnecessary data leaks.

For all departments, tools like CoPilot can help generate and augment content, allow the writer to try different styles and ask questions for more information. Artificial intelligence can be a game changer for your business; to learn more, contact your trusted technology advisor today. 

The explosion in popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) is hard to ignore, as one of the biggest – if not the biggest–technology trends in 2024 and beyond. How will your business use this technology? Read on to learn about developing a strategy to harness AI’s power.

Growth in Popularity of AI 

The popularity in and market for artificial intelligence only continues to grow. According to a CompTIA article on AI statistics, the global market is expected to grow to $407 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 36.2%. The U.S. market is expected to surpass that, increasing to $594 billion by 2032, growing 19% year over year from 2023 on. 

Businesses are at varying states of the adoption/implementation journey. According to the CompTIA report, 22% of firms are “aggressively” implementing artificial intelligence. Another third of firms are implementing AI in a more limited way, and the majority of firms (45%) are still exploring implementation. Even with its popularity, some hesitation exists because of challenges—including the cost of upgrading applications, building out infrastructure, along with the need to fully understand the data that goes into properly training artificial intelligence. 

Formulate a Strategy for AI Implementation

As with other popular technology, your business needs to consider its goals and how artificial intelligence can help you reach them. Examples of such goals include automation and refinement of routine tasks; enhancement of the customer experience via personalization; analysis of data; and content creation.

You’ll also need to consider how to mitigate risks associated with artificial intelligence. Start with security to ensure your staff is trained to follow policy and your proprietary and sensitive data is protected. How will your company deal with hesitation on the part of workers to embrace AI, because of fear of it automating their jobs? What about the quality of data used to train AI’s large language models, data which may include bias? Also to consider is protecting privacy and complying with regulations. The financial cost can include updating applications and building needed infrastructure. These are just a few questions to consider when developing your strategy.

Artificial intelligence has shown itself to bring potential benefits to businesses across many industries. For help in developing or refining your strategy, contact your trusted technology advisor today.

Artificial Intelligence seems to be the hot topic nowadays, in the business world and the world at large. Many of us use the technology, whether we know it or not. Visitors to a website see that chat window pop up, and it seems like a real person is on the other end. Because of AI, it is often a chatbot simulating personal interaction. With the rollout of Generative AI in the form of ChatGPT, previously unknown possibilities have arisen. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to boost business productivity but also carries risk. Read on to learn more about how to harness this technology for the benefit of your business while considering risks of its use.

ChatGPT Has Started a New Conversation

Recently, CompTIA published a blog post about how generative IT has created great potential to enhance everything we do, but also brings up serious questions. The article cites questions for business leaders to ask. One is, can you harness AI to improve your operations and offerings, and should you? What benefits does AI offer, and what risks? And what do customers want? As with all tech innovations, considering business goals first is key, and how the technology can be implemented to achieve these goals. One theme that stands out from the article: proceed, but with caution.

Benefits Come with Considerations

Some members of the CompTIA board of directors cite specific ways they’ve benefited from AI technology. For example, one is able to upload documents like contracts and let AI find any red flags ahead of time, reducing legal costs. Or an email scheduling app can remind a user of upcoming appointments, almost in the same way a human would. Perhaps AI could be used on a video call to summarize main points and come up with directions for what to do next. With AI, especially applications like ChatGPT, come different considerations.

Potential Risks of Generative AI 

According to Scott Barlow, one of the authors, “previous technologies helped organizations to grow faster and scale. AI will take that to the next level and enable everyone to be more productive.” He goes on to say that it comes with more risks than other applications. Errors, or “hallucinations” can happen, where the accuracy of the model deteriorates. One model’s ability to respond correctly to math questions dropped from 93% to 30%, according to Barlow. Aside from this, data may be biased, leading the algorithm to generate content that may unfairly exclude others. And how transparent is the model’s process of generating the result? Explainability is another issue–how did the large language model (LLM) used find the result it did. 

One of the big risks is security. For starters, even though AI has potential to spot threats, it could also enable even an amateur hacker to write malware into code and distribute it via a sophisticated phishing email, or simply find other ways to intrude into your company’s network. Companies will need to consider access controls, such as which LLMs they allow their workers to use. Additionally, this use needs to be protected by a firewall and must not access an organization’s intellectual property. Protecting customers’ personally identifiable information is also paramount. Artificial intelligence also has the potential to value efficiency over interacting with people, another thing to think about preventing. While people enjoy using AI in the form of ChatGPT and what it generates, they still need to interact with a human. Or they need to be given that choice. 

While AI’s capabilities and potential are exciting, we still need to proceed carefully and watch out for risks. For further guidance, contact your trusted technology advisor today. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used in some form for several years. Typical applications of AI include advanced-analytics and machine learning algorithms used to perform numerical and optimization tasks like predictive modeling. Generative AI, in contrast, has matured quickly due to enormous financial investment. According to a recent article by McKinsey and Company, generative AI has the potential to change how people create and the very anatomy of work. Read on to learn more about the potential and challenges of this new form of artificial intelligence. 

The Potential of Generative Artificial Intelligence

What Generative AI is and Why it Matters

In the article, generative artificial intelligence is defined as AI that is typically built using foundation models and having capabilities that earlier artificial intelligence lacked. Generative AI can generate content, which earlier AI couldn’t do. A foundational model is based on deep learning, akin to the neural layers in the human brain. The foundational model uses (is trained) on vast amounts of unstructured and unlabeled data to perform tasks immediately, or that data can be refined to accomplish specific tasks. Generative AI has the potential to add value and increase revenue in businesses across all sectors; when applied across industries, the use cases for generative AI could deliver a total value of $2.6 to $4.4 trillion of economic benefits per year. 

Generative AI could change the anatomy of work altogether, eliminating certain mundane tasks that take up a good part of each workday. It was forecast that AI might automate 50% of tasks between 2035 and 2070; the estimate has since been adjusted to nearly a decade earlier than that. Call centers, sales, banking and other industries have the potential to use generative AI in imaginative ways to improve processes, cut costs and increase revenue. 

Use Cases for Generative AI in Various industries

Generative AI, with its power to speed processes and generate  content, will play a vital role in the knowledge economy–academia, banking, finance–as well as in business departments like marketing and sales. 

Some examples:

• Sales and Marketing: gathering data for marketing campaigns, crafting personalized emails according to market segments and demographics; and generating sales leads. Improvement in SEO can help increase conversions and lower cost through optimization for “page titles, image tags and URLs” along with supporting specialists in creating content and distributing it to customers. 

• Customer Service: Faster access to customer information; the ability to resolve customer service requests on first contact; ability to help more customers during the workday. The economic value could cover 30 to 45% of current function costs.

• Software development: writing code, creating numerous architecture designs, and processing data. 

With Possibilities Come Risks

The uses of generative AI may only be limited to the imagination of the users. With this potential comes possible risks that businesses and society need to grapple with. Do generative AI models come up with accurate information, free of bias? What about explainability–is it clear how the model provides its results? There is also the risk of bad actors manipulating the tool to produce more frequent and more sophisticated attacks, even producing fake audio and video content (“deep fakes”). Other concerns have to do with the security and privacy of data, including that which identifies individuals. What challenges will actually emerge, remain to be seen.

While generative AI has tremendous capacity to transform, it disrupts at the same time. For more guidance on harnessing generative AI, contact your trusted technology advisor today.