AI, or Artificial Intelligence, has been the buzzword on everyone's lips lately. Since the release of ChatGPT at the back end of 2022, AI seems to have taken the world by storm.
AI however is not as new of a concept as you may think. In fact, Artificial Intelligence has been around since the 1950's, just not like as we see it today. Alan Turing and Arthur Samuel were the early fathers of machine intelligence in the early 50's and John McCarthy coined the term in 'Artificial Intelligence' in 1955. We cover more of the history of AI in another article.
But why had the majority of the population never paid any attention to AI until now?
And why all of a sudden does it seem that all businesses are in an AI race with each other?
We thought it might be useful to run you through what it actually is and how you can use it to improve your business.
What is AI?
In a nutshell, AI is the simulation or imitation of human intelligence in a machine. This intelligence can not only act like a human, it can think and learn.
Artificial Intelligence is actually an entire field of study, just like Physics or Mathematics for instance.
AI is the umbrella term, and underneath that you have:
Machine Learning (ML), this is the subset of AI that allows computers to learn from data and continuously improve their performance over time without being specifically programmed to.
Then you have Deep Learning, this is a subset of Machine Learning that works more like a Human by using artificial neural networks (just like human brain's use neurons) to connect many different layers of data together to make complex decisions.
Deep Learning can then be broken down further into:
Discriminative Models - these look at data and categorise it, based on patterns they have recognised from previous information they have been fed in the past.
Language Learning Models - these are systems trained to understand and produce human language, learning language patterns by studying vast amounts of text.
Generative AI - this is the creative element of AI. Instead of just pattern recognition, it actually creates its own new content using the information its already learnt, so that it looks similar to what it's already been trained on.
The tools that have become so poplar today like ChatGPT are a combination of these, and it is this combination that has created the powerful AI we are familiar with today.
What can AI offer your business?
You've probably seen some of the crazy things that AI can do, from creating 'deep-fakes' of famous people saying random things, to AI generated music videos. Whilst very impressive, these examples of AI are largely gimmicky at this stage.
However, there a lot of very practical applications of AI that are being employed across progressive organisations all over the world. We used the word 'employ' for a reason, because the technology is literally carrying out the complex jobs that humans either could or could not do - just with the added bonus of being much quicker and much cheaper than a human, with the energy to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year for you.
Businesses who adopt AI correctly could potentially gain a massive competitive advantage on their competition. Here are a couple of the ways you could deploy AI throughout your business:
Customer Service and Support - Intelligent and conversational AI chatbots can take a lot of the time out of a business needed for humans to answer customer sales queries and handle ongoing client support.
Operations - Automation built into a businesses processes to make them more efficient, working through more tasks quicker than a human could and without the human-error. This also improves job satisfaction as it can take away the most mundane and repetitive tasks to make working more enjoyable.
Finance and Accounting - Whilst vision models can automate administrative tasks around filing invoices and purchase orders etc, AI algorithms at the strategic end can help identify fraud, assess risk and inform financial decision making.
Sales - AI can assist with a lot of the thinking that comes with selling, namely the homework around it. AI can help you find ideal customers to target, help you generate the relevant research for them and help you craft the winning pitches to deliver to them.
Marketing - AI can help provide in depth analysis on trends in data to help you predict the latest opportunities, craft the perfect strategies or deliver campaigns that perform to their ideal customer segments. It can also help play a key role in accurately personalising content which is essential to win today.
However, there are a number of risks and limitations that come with relying on AI as a business, but we'll go into more detail on some of these in a separate article.
How do we use AI at MN8?
At MN8, AI helps us in a number of ways. We use it everyday at different stages across all of our process, all with the view to driving more revenue for our clients, improving the quality of our work or cutting our costs so that we can deliver great prices.
One thing we do say though, is that AI is always a tool for us, and not an answer.
Whenever we use AI, we make sure humans play a critical role before and after it has added its magic.
AI helps us a lot, but it augments our peoples ingenuity, it doesn't replace them.
The work that AI helps us with, had already been employing successful techniques and strategies before AI came in to help us scale up.
If you would like to learn more about how we use AI to grow businesses and see how you could use it for yours, get in touch here and we can arrange a conversation.
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