Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already emerged as a game changer, automating processes along with supporting creative work. Where your organization stands on AI, and how well you approach integrating it into your organization, will set the stage for your implementation. Read on to learn how to develop a plan for AI in your organization

Assessing Your Company’s Attitude Toward Artificial Intelligence

It’s been found that the attitude most likely to enable transformation using AI is an “AI-first” view–making AI fundamental to your organizational culture. Openness toward artificial intelligence includes recognizing how AI will align with business mission,value and goals. But how will your company arrive at this stance? It may not happen overnight. Companies that are willing to use AI to support operations, even if it doesn’t play a central role may be able to get to “AI-first” sooner than businesses where workers are resistant to or ignorant of AI. 

A good first step, in considering getting to an AI-First stance, is to “take the pulse” of your organization. Are more people in favor of than resistant to AI use? What are their fears about AI (perhaps that their jobs will be eliminated, for example)? What about AI excites them? Perhaps it’s the ability to use AI to brainstorm ideas for content, or ask AI questions, or saving time on routine tasks? Artificial intelligence can give insights that humans may not have thought of. Another issue is how much people trust the data used in the models, and results based on that data. Having a clear idea of your organization’s stance will show you the path toward effective AI implementation.

The Role of Business Leadership

The more a company – especially its leadership –  knows about artificial intelligence and how it works, the better able it is to leverage it for business goals. At the same time, each company is different, and how AI will help support goals is different. Understanding the role AI will have will help dispel doubts and fears about the technology. What’s increasingly clear is that people interacting with AI can be more productive than humans or machines alone; once users learn this, they likely will have a more positive attitude toward AI. The way company leadership plans implementation, with clear guardrails and procedures, will help an organization embrace artificial intelligence. 

No question, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. To learn more about what it can do to transform your business, contact your trusted technology advisor today. 

No question about it, artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Both generative forms of AI – for content generation, augmentation and automation, are commonly used for productivity. If your company is using AI, you can be sure cyber criminals are, too. Read on to learn about safe and effective use of artificial intelligence, including using it to beat bad actors at their game.

The Two “Sides” of Artificial Intelligence

Like most technology and technological tools, AI can be used for legitimate purposes by businesses, or unlawful and harmful aims like injecting malicious code or developing sophisticated social engineering attacks by cyber criminals.

On the “good” side, AI is helpful to businesses in content generation and process automation, and sentiment can be positive. According to a recent Telarus article, Gartner predicts that spending on generative AI is expected to top $600 billion in 2025, an increase of more than 75% from last year. The article also cites McKinsey, with that firm expecting more than 92% of executives increasing investment over the next three years. Not only are executives expressing confidence, but 72% of workers see AI bringing value to their work and 70% believing that gaining AI skills will improve marketability. Worries about AI replacing humans have ebbed, but other concerns remain. 

Of course, executives and other workers are not the only ones leveraging AI– so are bad actors. Increasingly, cyber attacks involving AI include sophisticated phishing schemes that can trick even vigilant email recipients. Exploiting vulnerabilities in platforms and models to introduce malicious code and attacks such as WormGPT and FraudGPT to steal money and set up fraudulent accounts, are additional dangers, according to a Telarus article about the recent RSAC conference. The same automation capability of artificial intelligence can be used to launch attacks, as well. 

Using Artificial Intelligence to Fight Cyberattacks

Interestingly, the very technology cybercriminals use in order to create more sophisticated attacks can also defend against these attacks. Businesses can use AI to help with cybersecurity in these ways:

• Threat Detection and Response: AI can analyze vast amounts of security data in logs and network traffic to identify unusual behavior that might signal an attack.

• Patching endpoints: even small to medium-size businesses have endpoints to protect, and AI can help identify which ones are vulnerable, and automate patching, even stopping incidents before they start.

• Email Security: Machine learning algorithms can find suspicious emails that signal possible phishing schemes. 

Artificial intelligence is growing more popular with businesses and bad actors alike. To learn how to develop a plan for using AI in cybersecurity efforts, contact your trusted technology advisor today. 

Data feeds artificial intelligence, and your company’s data will feed the artificial intelligence that you use for automation, content generation, and other tasks. How do you know if your data is ready to train artificial intelligence models, and how will you prepare it for that goal? Read on to learn more about preparing your data for AI’s use, making sure it’s as error- and bias-free as possible, and that your infrastructure is ready, too.

The Importance of Data Quality for AI Initiatives

Since data is the “lifeblood” of artificial intelligence, it’s vital to have the best-quality data for your company’s AI initiatives. First, data needs to be reviewed to make sure it’s consistent, free of duplicates, and as bias-free as possible. Consistency of the data, beyond its training of the models to produce accurate results, also supports team collaboration; the ability to adapt and expand AI as your company’s needs grow (scalability); making auditing and reporting easier for the purpose of regulatory compliance; and overall trust in AI’s role in business decision-making. Duplicate data can cause certain data to be given too much importance, resulting in bias. This duplication could even undermine the ability of the models to learn patterns. And errors in data could produce incorrect results, or hallucinations. 

Other Components of Data Readiness

Security of your data is a starting point. Has your company performed a data audit, searching for confidential, personal or private information, so it is safe and secure? In terms of governance, what are your underlying policies for determining how secure your data is for use by employees with AI models? Part of governance is data confidentiality and the access to data, ensuring the data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Managing the data is yet another component, and involves having the tools and architecture to handle the volume of data and how fast it is generated.

Consulting with a Technology Advisor

The next step could be a consultation with your technology advisor. One question to consider is your business goals and how the benefits of artificial intelligence can support these goals. You’ll also need to consider your infrastructure and if it has enough bandwidth for the demands of AI. Along with increased bandwidth, latency needs to be decreased. Also, will you keep your data on-premises, go with colocation, or with managed hosting? These options have pros and cons to consider.

Using artificial intelligence, while helping reach business goals, also requires much thought and planning. For help, contact your trusted technology advisor today.

While artificial intelligence can be misused by bad actors to create more sophisticated attacks, it can also help organizations defend against these attacks. How? Read on to learn about the dual nature of artificial intelligence, and how it can be used for good in your organization to enhance your cybersecurity posture.

Artificial Intelligence Changes Threat Landscape

With all of AI’s potential, it can be used for good or for ill. Threats can become more sophisticated, including:

• Phishing: AI can be used to design highly sophisticated phishing schemes, causing an email to appear to be from a CEO authorizing actions that can result in fraud. Moreover, the usual tell-tale signs of a phishing email (like grammar and typographical errors) are eliminated, making the email seem legitimate.

• Deep Fakes: Artificial intelligence can be used to construct fake videos from audio and video clips, making a person appear to say something they never said. Your company could experience reputational damage as a result.

• Employees may unintentionally leak private or confidential information through rogue AI.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Enhance Your  Cybersecurity Posture

Even with this daunting picture, artificial intelligence also has potential for good, by bolstering cybersecurity. Since its models are trained on vast amounts of data, it automatically scans for threats with an efficiency that surpasses mere human effort. By analyzing data quickly, It can detect threats early, and keep a small abnormality from becoming a security incident. Should an attack occur, IT staff can mitigate the damage quickly.

Employee Education and Training Still Needed

According to an article by CompTIA, data collection and AI algorithms are becoming a cornerstone of cybersecurity. Even with AI’s immense power, human intervention and education are still necessary. For instance, workers will still need to know how to recognize a phishing email and follow procedures to prevent its consequences. Human oversight is still needed on the part of IT professionals who can evaluate AI’s results. Every employee still needs training in cybersecurity, since many security incidents result from human error. 

With artificial intelligence becoming central in cybersecurity, its potential is exciting. Yet, companies need to consider how big a role it will have in their business. For further guidance, contact your trusted technology advisor today.

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.