To use AI in business, let alone to deploy your own AI for solving business problems is not a decision to be taken lightly. This article looks at the question of AI use a little closer.
Wherever You Look: People Daydreaming of AI
The dream of having “your own digital employee” or some kind of a “digital workforce” seems to be on may people’s minds these days. When people are done dreaming, and when (or if, at all) they (hopefully) wake up, they will have to sit down and do some real thinking; and do it themselves…
Every man and their dog are talking about “AI” these days but, it turns out, very few of them actually know what they’re talking about. So we need to be clear about what it is that we’re dealing with in the first place. It is not AI when you sit down and punch in some stuff into an input field on a website like ChatGPT and ClaudeAI, or when Microsoft’s infamous Co-Pilot interrupts you or does the “thinking” for you. No, this is just basic user-level stuff when you are at a computer nowadays. It does not require you to know anything! The lure seems to be that many people suddenly feel “more powerful” or “smarter” when simply applying consumer-level tools like that. As this is not based in reality, let us disregard this nonsense right from the start.
Being “able” to use a pocket calculator is not anything anyone would consider especially advanced these days either.
What Is AI, Really?
Real AI use happens when real people are able to craft a useful prompt and then receive back an output that delivers real-life results faster, with less manpower or effort and, therefore, overall more efficiently.
This is not rocket science, and it does not require a PhD. Correspondingly, you don’t need one to figure this out — though it is so modern these days to overlook this simple, and very basic, fact.
AI is not to do with robots doing marvelous things either.
What AI really is, is a tool that enables you to increase your productivity — if you know how to use it right in the first place.
To be able and do that, you need to know a lot about (a) your own abilities and the task at hand and (b) the basics about what AI can and cannot do, which tools are available, and to select the right tool for the right task.
What It All Means
This means, to really profit from AI you need to have something like a functioning method or an AI Strategy. Alternatively, you need to find someone who has that expertise and who can adequately advise you on the potential, the real-life uses for your situation, and the limitations of AI, of generative tools, or of solutions and platforms that can be applied toward a certain desired outcome or use case.
These are the basics people need to understand first before they even start using or deploying AI for any gainful endeavor. The rest is just playing around, wasting time, or letting yourself be entertained through a “new media format”. Chatting with some Chatbot or with ChatGPT or with Gemini, with ClaudeAI, Grok, and all the others usually is just that: worthless play.
If you’re a photographer and your task is isolating an object within an image, you’re likely aware of tools out there that can help to make this task easier; you may also be aware of automatic tools making it yet easier and, what’s more, much faster; or you may know that a number of yet more advanced tools, specialized and optimized to varying degrees for tasks like this, have been developed and are still under development, and are constantly refined, these days. These may include AI-based image manipulation, image generation, or image optimization, or even image-to-video tools. If you also know which particular tool is best suited for the task at hand, and you then decide to apply this tool for that task specifically, then you have made use of AI in a sensible way.
How to Get Better Clarity About AI
The lines are blurred though, and it is paramount to know the difference, define what exactly one is talking about, and ultimately also have some basic understanding of the overall topic to be able to actually use this technology for getting any worthwhile results.
In essence, it all comes down to augmenting with AI rather than replacing humans by some AI tool entirely — because businesses that do will fail pretty fast. At the end of the day, an AI-enhanced business may become more efficient, faster, and more profitable as a result — if it employs the right AI strategy and is smart enough to deploy only the tools that are suitable at the places that are suitable for them. The result would be a Hybrid-AI outcome where the tools, platforms, and solutions are sensibly used where they make sense — just like the example of the calculator (above) where it would not make any sense cooking dinner or “calculating” your favorite meal with it; that’s an application the tool is not suitable for.
Hybrid-AI as a Solution — and Only if Used With a Sensible AI Strategy
An All-AI business is not a solution but a problem (in most cases anyway, surprisingly even including e-comm and many other online businesses). Nobody in their right mind would entrust AI with really making real decisions as human ability is far superior and free of AI Halucination and similar, potentially very costly, problems. Simply try using AI for something non-trivial once, and you’ll experience in real life where this technology’s limits are.
AI-augmentation or Hybird-AI solutions may be developed through an appropriate AI Strategy though; these aspects will be discussed further in separate articles, so keep watching for new additions being published here soon.