By Jake Poinier
In late November 2022, ChatGPT—the prototype artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI—notched more than a million users in its first week. By February, it had set a record for the fastest app to reach 100 million users.What’s all the buzz about? Even if you haven’t personally experimented with ChatGPT or Bing AI, similar technologies are having an ever-increasing impact on how businesses operate and interact with customers. Because AI can process vast amounts of data far faster and more accurately than the human brain, it’s an ideal tool to automate mundane tasks, identify trends, increase operational efficiency, and even improve safety and quality.Technically, AI has been around for decades, but it’s gone from a crawl to a run in the past few years. In that time, the technology has vastly improved, making it a powerful tool that businesses are using to:
Generate content and strategy. Content creation is one of the easier tasks to conceptualize and execute using AI. And, unlike humans, AI never gets bogged down with writer’s block. Competition has flooded the market with thousands of free and paid applications that specialize in different types of functions, including research on industry topics, SEO, competitors and marketing strategy. Caution is required, however, before you upload an AI-generated blog post, landing page, or press release. AI writing may sound polished, but it’s not foolproof. And it always needs human input such as editing and fact checking.
Interact with customers. We’ve come a long way since the early days of pre-programmed chatbots that had us begging for a human customer service rep. As with content-generation tools, there is a never-ending stream of AI tools that can handle customer service functions in natural language around the clock, without a coffee break.
In addition to understanding and responding to a customer’s immediate needs, they can use data and predictive analytics to recommend other products a customer might be interested in. They are also making ongoing improvements in routing to the correct person if human intervention is needed. The newest advances are coming in the form of virtual assistants: human-like 3D avatars that are capable of interpreting a user’s facial expressions and eye contact to help with communication.
Identify trends and patterns. In the healthcare sector, AI has been deployed to discover data patterns beyond the capabilities of human researchers and to help physicians make more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans. In financial services, AI has become a key tool in fraud detection and security, and it’s also widely used for tasks such as loan approvals, wealth management planning, and due diligence. Similarly, pattern detection in IT enables early identification of problems such as hacking and ransomware attacks.
Optimize operations. AI has brought sweeping changes into the industrial sector and throughout every aspect of the supply chain. For years, warehouses have been employing increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms for optimizing inventory management, but some of the newer advances include wearable technologies for workers such as smart glasses that recognize bar codes.
Predictive machine maintenance allows technicians to optimize decisions on when maintenance will be needed and should be performed. In transportation, self-driving vehicles are the ultimate goal—but while humans are still at the wheel, AI is helping with logistics and traffic management.
Improving safety. AI can harvest data from a wide range of cameras and sensors to monitor potentially dangerous conditions or behaviors at hazardous workplaces such as construction sites, mines, and utility plants—and then recommend corrective actions or opportunities for improvement. At a granular level, AI technologies can be used to ensure that workers are adhering to safety protocols and that truck drivers aren’t distracted.
Ready to make the leap?
While AI offers the potential for a competitive advantage—lowering costs, increasing efficiency, and boosting productivity—the landscape changes radically every day.
As with any new business process, the best practices start with defining your goals and measuring the results. Identifying the right data sets and algorithms is paramount, as is having an IT team with the appropriate skills and experience. While it can make sense to test drive one of the many free AI services that are available, a paid service may be required to get the functionality, scalability and performance needed.
The user experience with AI may seem like magic, but it’s not without risks. Back in the early days of computing, the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” was coined to express how important it was to input accurate, unbiased data—and that hasn’t changed.
In many cases, AI serves as a black box at the programming level, which may make it difficult to know the assumptions that went into a given algorithm or the accuracy of a data set. Finally, as with every technology, you want to ensure the privacy and security of proprietary information, as well as customer and employee data.