How to make AI work for your company

In the year since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the landscape has changed dramatically.

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) of yore – a chatbot providing answers to any question you could think of – was reminiscent of a Magic 8 ball: slightly amusing, with all responses to be taken with a grain of salt.

In the months since, AI has moved from a novel curiosity to a critical technology for startup founders, redefining everything from contract writing and assessing talent during the day to suggesting the next Netflix must-watch at night.

And while 2023 was a big year for AI, 2024 is predicted to be even bigger – here’s to fridges that tell you what to make for dinner, am I right?

For many, Caffeine included, the rapidity of AI’s rise is a little scary – I blame Arnold Schwarzenegger, personally. But, perhaps it doesn’t need to be?

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With care, AI can be a force for good, helping founders ride that startup roller coaster without getting too motion-sick. The tricky part is figuring out where to start.

Fortunately, that’s what we’re here for. ‘Ask About AI’ is a new Caffeine series largely determined by you, dear reader. A digital panel, if you will, to demystify AI use in the startup world.

Each month, your questions about using AI in business are put to four experts: Paul O’Neil, EMA’s head of legal, consultancy and general counsel; Madeline Newman, executive director at AI Forum NZ; Ming Cheuk, co-founder & CTO of AI agency Element X, and, for good measure, the inimitable ChatGPT.

PARTNERS 

This month, we start with the issue at the forefront of many minds: I am not necessarily tech-savvy, but I want to know how AI can help improve my business operations. Where should I start?

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Paul O’Neil

The most important thing to do before you dive into incorporating AI into your business is to identify what your needs actually are.  

AI is highly topical at the moment, but its popularity doesn’t mean your business should invest time and resources in it before understanding how it can help you.

Certain processes, such as customer Q and A, logistics processes, or the preparation of template documents (to name only a few examples), can be made vastly more efficient by AI and can save you time and money. You can also use AI to help prepare the first cuts of strategic and budget documents, provided you remember that AI is here to help human decision-making, not to replace it.

When assessing what your needs are, you also need to look at the management of risks around issues like privacy and intellectual property so that you stay on the right side of the law in your use of AI.

Investing time in determining how AI can help you will produce rewards in the form of a properly considered AI strategy.

O’Neil is the head of legal, consultancy and general counsel at the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA). Having recently been involved in EMA’s ‘AI Show,’ he brings a legal angle to the AI discussion.

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Ming Cheuk

There are two sides of the coin to good AI application – the business problem and the technology capability.

The typical school of thought is to start with the business problem before looking for the solution. Often, the problem can be solved without AI, let alone software. However, there are some problems where traditional rules-based software approaches are too inflexible to handle the data that needs to be processed, such as customer enquiries and image data; these are the perfect candidates for AI.

If the problem is a good candidate for AI to solve, and the technology is capable enough, chances are someone is working on it already – whether it’s integrated into an existing product or a new product entirely.

Contract review is an obvious one, given the sudden jump in the capability of natural language models. DocuSign, for instance, is already working on bringing generative AI capabilities to extract, understand, and analyse legal documentation to improve contract workflow efficiency. Leveraging existing solutions like these will often be much cheaper and faster than building your own.

However, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, there is merit in understanding the technology capability yourself. AI models have become increasingly accessible to the non-tech savvy since the advent of ChatGPT, which gives a ‘taste’ of the current capabilities.

If ChatGPT can understand a piece of image or text and provide a good output, there’s a good chance you can automate a particular part of your business operation using AI.

Cheuk has been involved with AI for over a decade. As his startup, ElementX (Previously Spark 64), is dedicated to assisting businesses in leveraging AI, he provides insights into the startup side of AI. He also serves as an executive council member for the AI Forum NZ.

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Madeleine Newman

Look up!

The beauty about the developments in AI is that they are rapidly becoming more accessible to everyone – a whole raft of no-code options are beginning to emerge that are easy to use – and a good number of them are free.

I advise people to start by playing with the tool sets in a safe space – spend 45 minutes with the free version of Chat GPT, Llama2, Bard, Gemini or Amazon Q. Give it some real tasks to do, like writing a report, summarising the key points in an email trail or creating insights from a dataset. Remember to keep your prompts (questions) general, without sharing confidential information, until you have the right governance and security in place.

Don’t accept the first answer; keep pushing it to do a better job - and in the process, you will be teaching yourself to be a prompt engineer (ask the right questions).

Once you are more familiar with what it can do, you’ll be much better placed to start thinking about where in your business you can use it most effectively - and what rules and guidance you want to put in place for your team. Take a look at this free resource we have created to help you do that: aigovernance.nz

If you need more help, the AI Forum NZ has plenty of members happy to help.

Newman is the executive director of AI Forum New Zealand, a tech community promoting the economic opportunities raised by AI and supporting AI application in society. She brings a broad understanding of AI policy and practice to the discussion.

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ChatGPT

For non-tech-savvy small business owners keen on integrating AI:

• Identify specific operational challenges first.
• Seek user-friendly AI tools and cloud platforms with intuitive interfaces tailored for small businesses.
• Prioritise practical applications like task automation and customer interaction management.
• Explore pre-built solutions and attend workshops for foundational knowledge.
• Consider consulting with AI experts for personalised guidance.

This approach ensures a seamless integration of AI into your operations, enhancing efficiency and competitiveness.

Need it any introduction? Launched November 2022 by Open AI, ChatGPT is based on a large language model, allowing users to have human-like conversations with a chatbot.

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If you have an AI question you’d like answered reach out at mary@caffeinedaily.co