Artificial intelligence is changing how we do business. This rapidly evolving technology is delivering enormous productivity benefits and can support you to better meet your customer needs and help you make faster and more informed decisions.
While there is a lot of hype about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), we also know that there is a fair amount of apprehension, with many businesses taking a ‘wait and see’ approach, or not understanding how AI is relevant their business.
This is a mistake. AI is quickly becoming an essential business tool and if you’re too slow to embrace its opportunities, you risk losing your competitive advantage. It’s important to be aware that while you might not be using AI, your competitors almost certainly will be.
To help demystify AI for New Zealand businesses, and to kickstart a conversation about how it can be integrated into business processes, we recently hosted our Future of Work series.
The series saw the EMA, with our partners NewZealand.AI, host several webinars with a range of experts and thought leaders, culminating in the AI Show – a one-night extravaganza bringing everything together.
Throughout the series, we aimed to answer your questions. And while we did our best to answer most of the questions we received at the time, this blog post aims to address some of the questions we did not have the chance to answer.
A common theme was where do you start when it comes to implementing AI into your business, how can it be used and what are some of the platforms that should be explored?
But before diving in, it’s important to understand what AI is.
AI involves machines performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. This includes problem-solving, recognising speech and learning from data. The real benefit of AI is that it allows you to process a vast amount of data quickly, supporting you to make quicker and more informed decisions.
It can support customer service chatbots, sales and CRM tools, email management, document analysis, voice assistants, financial analysis and recruitment. Unlike humans, AI systems don’t get tired, take time off or have an ‘off day’.
But AI also has its limitations. The system you implement is only as good as the information you feed into it. It will also lack the nuanced understanding of human emotions and cultural contexts and can struggle with novel situations that differ significantly from its training data. That means you do need to exercise caution when relying on AI to make crucial business decisions.
While you need to take account of these risks, introducing AI into your business can free your team from time-consuming, repetitive tasks and focus them on more productive and rewarding activities. This means it can deliver significant improvements in productivity.
When it comes to introducing AI, the first step is identifying those areas in your business that would benefit most from it. Common areas include customer service (chatbots), sales (predictive analytics), stock management (demand forecasting) or marketing (personalised content creation).
Once you have identified your needs, the next step is finding the right AI tool that can deliver the solution. There are two options here. You can either build your own platform or purchase a tool that can be integrated into your systems. The decision you make will largely come down to the size of your budget and what you want to use AI for.
The good news is that there are a wide range of AI tools available for purchase that are affordable, user-friendly and can be easily integrated into your existing systems. Better still, the list of products is growing every day and AI capability is increasingly being built into the most common software platforms. This means you are likely to find a solution that meets your needs without having to invest in the significant cost of building your own platform.
To understand the range of AI tools available, visit our Future of Work partner New Zealand.AI and check out some of the platforms and tools that are available right now that can be implemented into your business tomorrow.
Remember, you don’t need to change everything you do overnight. You can start small by introducing something as simple as a chatbot with basic functionalities to support your customer support team. Starting small allows you to measure effectiveness and adjust without overwhelming your team or your budget.
Once you have decided on your tool, you need to leverage your data. AI thrives on quality data, so make sure that you are collecting the right data – from customer interactions, sales, web traffic – and that this data is clean and unbiased.
Once you have this data, you are ready to feed it into your AI platform, allowing it to provide you with the insights and automation capabilities you are after. But before doing so, make sure you have invested in adequate training and education.
Make sure you and your team understand how to get the most out of your chosen platform. This doesn’t mean you need to become an AI expert, but it does mean having a basic understanding of how the tools work and what they can do.
Once you have completed your training and are ready to roll your AI platform out, it’s important that you don’t just ‘set and forget’. You will need to regularly monitor its performance and fine-tune where necessary to correct for any errors or anomalies, ensuring it is not producing unintended outcomes. Remember, you are still legally responsible for any decisions or outputs from your AI system.
This legal onus is why it is important to introduce an AI policy that outlines acceptable and unacceptable uses of the technology. The policy should codify how your data can be used and mandate that human input is required at critical decision points, so you have oversight of the outcomes you will be legally accountable for.
Still not sure how to get started or how AI can be integrated into your business? We are here to help. The EMA has developed a range of packages and bundles to assist New Zealand businesses in understanding how they can harness the potential of AI. These packages include workshops, learning and policy bundles and webinars that will give you everything you need to introduce AI into your business with confidence.
To learn more visit futureofwork.ema.co.nz.
