AI for the rest of us

The real gap in AI is between those who can use it effectively in their work and those who can’t.

You’ve used ChatGPT and it feels both magical and eerie. It is a computer and it is talking back like a person.

But it is not a person. It is simply a new kind of software.

Your business runs on software today. Multiple apps and services that are shoehorned together.

It works but there’s a laundry list of things you wish could be done differently to save time and let you serve your customers better.

This is where AI comes in. But not the chatbot kind.

Imagine you could hire someone great at following instructions and has no feelings, no preferences, no wants but also no initiative, limited creativity, and a second-hand understanding of the world.

You’d likely pass because every job requires some level of humanity.

But within those jobs there is work perfect for someone dull with enough intelligence to make human-like decisions. And that’s what the AI is.

What AI is Not

AI is not going to replace all the jobs. If you were planning to sit on a beach while the computers do all of the work then I have bad news for you.

In 1951, IBM ran an ad in Fortune magazine for their Electronic Calculator with a headline that compared it to being equivalent to having 150 extra engineers.

A decade later, in 1961, TIME Magazine ran an article titled The Automation Jobless and claimed that computers were replacing jobs faster than the economy could create new ones, leading to structural unemployment.

President Kennedy cited estimates of 1.8 million jobs replaced annually by advanced machines. Some at the time even suggested that technology could create a “glut of productivity” making most work obsolete.

We are hearing exactly the same types of things today. But we know what happened since the 1950s and mass, permanent unemployment was not one of them.

And it won’t be now.

As a business owner you know that there is no end to the work. Customers always want more. They might love your service this year but find a problem with it the next.

That’s not to say nothing will change. Competitors are always trying to come up with new ways to serve the market better and attract more customers.

Businesses that do it well will prosper and those that don’t will close.

What AI Means for You

While computers won’t be doing all of the work, they will be able to do a lot of the work you wish you or your employees didn’t have to waste time on.

Things like parsing unstructured data and inputting them into a spreadsheet, moving data from one system to another, doing routine research and analysis, repetitive administrative work, data aggregation and visualization, and other tasks that take up a lot of time that could be put to better use.

So how can AI help you with this?

The one type of work that AI currently excels at is writing code. And because it is good at following directions and accepting preferences given to it, a well engineered system managed by a skilled team can create and operate more software than ever before.

Especially software that was, up until now, not cost-effective to produce and maintain.

Like the software you need to offload work you wish your company didn’t have to waste time doing.

So what would this look like?

We worked with a business that had data scattered across multiple systems. They could never get a cohesive read on how the business was actually doing. We used AI to create custom integrations that pulled the data into one screen they could actually trust.

If you have a data analyst on your team then this could be something they do manually on a weekly or daily basis. Maybe you are the business owner without a data analyst and it is what you do manually when you can.

Imagine being able to see an up-to-date and accurate health of your business using the metrics that matter to you.

Our process involves doing the work manually first so that we understand it. Then we build the tools and integrate AI where it is needed.

The cost is similar to hiring a person part-time to do the work except the price drops as automations are integrated. We will maintain and keep the software operational as well as provide reports so you know what work is getting done.

Where to start

If you have repetitive work that’s a chore or ever said “if only X could do Y” then tell us about it.

We will tell you if it is a good fit for a computer to handle or if it is something we can help you with. If it isn’t well suited to what the technology can do then we will tell you that too.

AI might be the biggest boon for small businesses since the personal computer, internet, and mobile phone.

And you might just need a little help to reap the benefits.