How you need to be using AI - or a virtual assistant

It feels - to me - like everywhere I turn and every work conversation I have mentions AI. But then I go and stand on the side of an U9's football game and I bring it up in conversation, and no one's heard of ChatGPT or OpenAI. And to be honest - I like that. I like that not everyone is using it for everything already, or heralding how we're all going to be replaced by robots in the next 4 years.

But if you can be using it for your business, then you should be considering doing so. I'm nervous to say "so as to give you a competitive edge" because so many people are already using it, you're not going to be leading the world if you introduce it now, but it will mean you're not being left behind. Technology feels like it's moving faster and faster and you want to keep up, even if you're not leading the parade.

So - how can you use it without it sounding like a robot wrote your website content? There are a few ways - and I'm not talking about ways that require huge investment like Amazon shipping people products before they've even bought them because they're so sure of their AI data that they can predict purchases.

Below is a list (written by me, not AI, although writing blog posts is certainly an option for how you could use it) of some possible ideas of how you can use artificial intelligence in your company, based on things we've been doing or looking at, with the intention that they could inspire you to think of other things you could use it for. It may well be that nothing in this list is quite suitable for you, but reading it makes you remember a repetitive, time consuming task that you'd like a hand with - if that's the case, just drop us a line incase we can find or implement an AI solution to help. With the tools available now it needn't be expensive. Also, thinking of AI as a "virtual assistant" can help bring to mind day to day tasks that you could do with a hand with.

A good chat bot

We can create AI content models which you feed all of your information to, so that it can then answer questions for those website visitors who can't find what they're looking for. It might be that you have lots of dry content that people sometimes want to know, but that you haven't found a good way to present without making them read through reams and reams of text. An AI powered ChatBot could digest all of that information, and be able to answer questions for anyone who asks nicely. You can see our demo of this sort of thing here.

Or a clever FAQs knowledge base

If you don't want an actual chat bot, just asking AI to put together some good FAQs or a knowledge base could still help you get the information people want to them effectively, so as to take the load off of your customer service teams. When does that event start? Do they need to book a table? Is there a warranty on that item?

Recruitment

Teamed with the above, it might not just be customers who are stopping by to ask you questions or seek out information. Potential candidates might want to send you a CV, or you might have lots of CVs to sift through, meaning an AI tool could help with that sifting process. AI can help with mundane tasks that are time consuming and competitive to free you up to deal with more exciting things. In the world of recruitment, AI also has the added bonus of not discriminating against anyone.

Image recognition

Our content collection tool Iszy.ai uses image recognition to flag up to you if something someone has sent you is offensive or illicit. This means it's either not published directly to your website (!) or - depending on your settings - not shown to you at all and sent straight to your spam folder. There are also other tools which sort through the hundreds of photos of the same thing you took at an event to suggest which ones are keepers.

Social media content creation

I have started spotting when an instagram post is written by AI and I'm most certainly not "here for it". Although perhaps if social media gets saturated with text like it then properly, humanly, written stuff will just stand out all the more, which will benefit the few of us who still like to write stuff. Or people will just need to get better at using the "tool" of AI, as - at the moment - it's only really as good as who is operating it. But it can certainly come in handy for tasks such as generating a post from a brochure you've already produced, or suggesting 3 different social media posts from one blog post you've published.

Illustration

Some of the images AI can create are amazing, so I've started using it on this site when I can't find a suitable thumbnail for a blog post. I simply ask for a "flip book style sketch of XYZ in teal and black on a white background" and you can see the sorts of things I've ended up with. Not all masterpieces, but at least they make our blog images a little more cohesive than they have a habit of being otherwise. This does echo back to what I've said about using AI as a tool which needs careful use though - I've had to refine what I ask for so as to determine the style, colour and background of the sketches. You can make your own images here.

Research and pitching

If you're approaching a new client, AI can really help with your research into their subject area, their background, and then answering the questions they want answered as part of your pitch. Sometimes people, when writing pitch docs, can come across a little robotic - using big words or terminolgy they're not actually all that comfortable with themselves so you end up with a doc full of buzz words and jargon and you're left trying to work out what they actually want. AI can break that down - robot to robot - and give you some pretty impressive answers to what are basically essay questions.

Scavenger hunt

Ok, so this isn't super relevant for a lot of businesses, but it is my favourite use of AI out of all the things we've used it for so far. We've arranged 2 different scavenger hunts in last few weeks and both times we gave ChatGPT a list of places where we wanted clues, and an order in which we wanted the clues to be found, and it wrote very cute clues for the whole hunt. Some needed tweaking, some weren't amazing, but most were poetic and completely useable.

They are just a few of the possible uses - others include things like help with accounting or financial planning, stock control, or related products and upsells. And of course you can get into machine learning and have AI help you spot trends and make predictions (something we're helping a long standing client with based on a wealth of data they've got in a certain area). So just have a think if there's anyway AI could be making your life easier, or pushing your business to the next level, and get in touch if you need a hand.