How to use AI to enhance your business

A lot has been said about the glories and limitations of AI, and lots of big companies have rushed into the generative AI world without much of a clue about what they want. Software development is very expensive for the smaller companies not in the software business, and thus they need to rely on vendors to produce technology to help them keep up.

At the end of the day, any new technology that applies to your company will have one of a few key features:

• Better: If it is better than what you had before, that acts in your favor. For example, few would argue against the notion that a car is better than walking for commuting 20 miles to and from work each day. Generally, subject to other factors identified, we can identify something as better. AI tends to be better at some things and worse at others. It is better at speech to text than typing in many cases. It is better at identifying certain patterns of cancer in XRays than doctors in some cases. It is better than I am at detecting things I program it to detect because it checks everything each time and I miss stuff - unless I use a checklist... but then we get to...
• Faster: AI tends to be faster at composition than people. It composes complete sentences, paragraphs, etc. with proper punctuation. Just because it produced decent reading material, however, does not make it better than human writing when it comes to actually saying what you mean. That's because AI does not have a thing you would call meaning for the most part, or even a concept of a concept that could allow it to have a concept of meaning... My AI applications that do things like look for indicators of fraud or propaganda and so forth are way faster at it than I am, and that also makes them better because at my speed, even with a checklist, I cannot stay awake long enough to do what the AI can do in a few minutes.
• Cheaper: AI is pretty inexpensive for the things it does, once it is doing them right for you. Imagine an employee having to manually configure all the settings on your desktop by typing commands into the computer instead of the automation allowing you to move a window around and remember where it is for next time. It's the same with AI - from an out of pocket expense perspective. On a line by line basis, I can generate more crap with AI than with a person for each dollar I spend. And like a cheaper pen, it might dribble crap all over my pages. But we don't all need to use the $25,000 pen for sale at the pen shop in Carmel by the Sea. I prefer the ones I buy in bulk for a few dollars each with a company name and contact information. You might prefer Bic. If I can get a person to do it for the same price, all other things being equal, why would I want to use AI?
• Enabler: AI can enable things you could not do before. In some sense, speed as an improvement in amount can turn into an improvement in kind. There are things you can do with real-time speech input that you could not do 20 years ago because it is faster now and can often even keep up - even though lately is has been incorrectly guessing what I said instead of listening to me. Actually more like humans every day - it hears what it wants to hear. AI has enabled me to do some things I otherwise just would not do. I would not check outbound emails for spamminess without my AI, and I would not undertake due diligence or metrics on hundreds of companies per year without the AI I use for the purpose. It would be too expensive and time consuming, but frankly, it is better at separating the wheat from the chaff at a first level of review, and it enables other business functions I can then perform.
• Requirement: Of course government agencies, your service providers, and your customers can essentially require you to use their AI (or some other one you pay for) if you want to deal with them. And in the case of government, the AI may be helping to put you in jail if you don't comply, or even if you do an it makes a mistake. No kidding, this has happened. So far, the only requirements for my use of AI have come from vendors (big tech companies) who are pushing their AI on me to continue to do my day-to-day work with them, and I am increasingly walking away from them rather than continue down the forced AI path.

How do I decide?

Other articles here have discussed making better decisions, and I of course think that using AI on a case-by-case basis is one of those decisions that can be aided by Decider... one of my cognitive computing tools that you can use for free (in the free version). In this case, it's pretty simple. You just create one factor for each of Better, Faster, Cheaper, Enable, and Requirement, and move them around the favorability and importance space for each instance where you are thinking about using AI. Once you decide to use AI for a particular purpose, you can do the same for product selection by comparing features where the features (including the factors I listed here) are used as factors and side by side comparisons or voting is used to decide between them.

This was the result of a decisions regarding the use of AI by workers for checking their marketing material against the manuals for the offerings we have. It takes a few extra seconds of their time to paste in the thing they are about to put into a posting into Cognos (another one of our apps) and have it tell them if their posting is inconsistent with the manual or other claims from the Web page.

It took me about a minute to do the analysis (longer to paste it into this article) and come to the conclusion using Decider. It's not very precise, and when I look at it now, Better should be higher up, but it doesn't change the decision, and satisficing is more than adequate for this decision.

Conclusions

AI can be useful for companies of all sizes and types. But making the business decision is non-trivial, and finding the places where the right tools do the right jobs is not that simple.

More information?

If you want to discuss decisions about using AI for your company, join us on our monthly free advisory call, usually at 0900 Pacific time on the 1st Thursday of the month:

and we will be happy to discuss it.

In summary

Use AI where it makes good business sense.