Why you’re not using AI properly (yet)

My interest and involvement in AI continues to grow. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear this. I’ve taught others about AI, built no-code AI solutions for clients, and built AI assistants for myself. 

I often ask customers and contacts about what they think of AI. Some are more scared it can do what they do, some find it really useful. 

Then I ask if anyone has used AI to automate their life or business. – this is when it goes quiet. 

We all love a bit of chatGPT to summarise our text, come up with a few ideas and answer questions. The thing is, that for most people this is manual text entry. You still have to be sat at a computer, have a web page or app open and type what you need. 

Very few people have automated things so stuff just happens. This is where the opportunity lies. 

• Imagine you could talk to your AI French teacher the same way you could call someone on your smartphone.

• Imagine you could find leads for your business, create emails that address their specific issues and send them all while you’re asleep.

• Imagine you could take a look at all the requests for quotations decide which ones fit the criteria for your business to bid for and assign the best ones to your colleagues to follow up on. All without touching a computer.

These are all AI projects that I’ve been involved in during the last week. This I believe is where the future lies. AI does the work, but it happens automatically. Once taught, it just gets on with the job. You don’t need to be involved.

I once sat in an office where the entire floor of staff just pushed pieces of paper around. They followed the process, got the relevant approvals, communicated where they were in the process and sent the requesters the results. I said to the senior manager that I could automate the entire floor and he could get rid of all the staff in about 9 months. – It wasn’t his responsibility as it turned out, but the look on his face was an absolute picture. Low value, but high accuracy work like this is destined for AI. 

So where am I going with this ? 

Firstly I want to tell you that this is the work that I do. I’d like to do more of it. If your business would like to reduce time, cost, interaction, and allow good people to do high value work rather than shuffle papers or paste things in spreadsheets, let me know. 

Secondly, I want you to know that this is where the world is going. If this isn’t something you’re actively doing now, you’re falling behind, because your competitors will be on to this to get ahead. 

It’s ultimately a mindset shift. You’ll have to start thinking about “how do we use AI and automation to do this?”, rather than “who can we ask to do this?”. 

Let me know what you think.