AI is so often in the news that eventually all of us will begin to ask, if we haven’t already, “What does it mean for me and my business”?

You might reasonably say “why don’t we just carry on as we have always done”?  I would liken that to ignoring the arrival of the internet or mobile phone in the 90’s.  Both have fundamentally changed the way we work and massively enhanced efficiencies and enabled all of us to do so much more than we once did.  Not just more of the same but allowed expansion into new areas which either didn’t exist (e.g. digital advertising) or about which we knew very little or nothing.

AI will penetrate every area of our existence in the same way that the internet has done, very possibly to a much greater extent and effect.  How can we harness this newfound capability to improve the effectiveness of what we do, whatever the purpose and implementation of that may be?

The best place to start is with the pain points in our business.  Become very clear as to the CAUSE of the pain, rather than the symptom, and then go about finding a mechanism to improve the situation.  Be clear about your objective first.  Is this about improving profitability, winning new business, enhancing the customer experience, financial reporting and analysis, supply chain and stock management or something else?

Then find an existing software tool that will either completely or mostly solve the problem.  If you know the cause of the pain and you can precisely define the desired outcome you can easily use an AI search tool, such as ChatGPT4, to provide all the options from which you can select the best.

When doing so, it is best to start small, simple and low cost.  You can always add layers of complexity later when you find what you have is inadequate to the task.  As Jim Collins, author of Good to Great amongst others says, fire a rifle bullet first to establish range and direction before firing off the big cannon.  If you run a low-cost trial it should become clear what works and what doesn’t.  Preserve your resources for when you know exactly what is needed.

Very occasionally the standard software products may not do what you need them to do if you are in a very niche industry or your systems and processes are unique.  In these exceptional circumstances you may be forced to develop a bespoke solution, which can be complex, time consuming and expensive.  In my experience of working with myriad types of business, people often think their business is much more exceptional than it is.  Their product might be exceptional or even unique, but the underlying systems that run the business rarely are.

I encountered a brilliant example of how to make use of AI in a very specialised business I work with.  They sell to distributors in the vehicle after-market and have a product list of over 6000 items, sourced from multiple suppliers in multiple countries.  Distributors don’t like to have to change their prices more than once or twice a year, so how on earth can their supplier manage the effects of inflation, commodity price shifts, currency changes and new products?  The answer is with a lot of pain and effort.

The senior manager responsible decided to enlist the assistance of AI to develop an automated system.  He spent a couple of five-hour sessions interrogating all the options and seeking all the pre-existing formats that can be used for the task to build a tool that would allow a new price list to be generated at the press of a button.  Had he done that in the old-fashioned way without AI, he reckoned it would have taken about a year to build (and he’s a very smart physics graduate from one of the best universities in the world)!

Very few businesses will need that level of bespoke AI tool.  The vast majority of needs can be simply and inexpensively fulfilled using readily available software. That means you will have expert assistance in its installation and operation, so that the advantages of automation, efficiency, transparency and consistency are available to you, if not immediately, then very swiftly and relatively painlessly.

 

Further resource

For deeper insights and real-world examples of AI applied across industries and business functions, explore these curated resources:

101 Real-World Generative AI Use Cases (Google)
A vast, industry-spanning collection of generative AI examples, from marketing chatbots to code generation – ideal for spotting quick-win projects and inspiration for your own pilot initiatives.
https://cloud.google.com/transform/101-real-world-generative-ai-use-cases-from-industry-leaders

AI Business Use Cases (IBM)
A concise overview of 27 high-ROI AI applications – like predictive maintenance, personalised customer experiences, and AIOps – with practical deployment tips and success stories.
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/artificial-intelligence-business-use-cases

AI Use Cases Catalog (AIMultiple)
Over 100 detailed, filterable case studies organized by function and industry, helping you zero in on exactly the kinds of AI solutions that match your business pain points.
https://research.aimultiple.com/ai-usecases/