By Ed Watal, Founder and Principal — Intellibus
The artificial intelligence revolution is here, and it is unlikely to go anywhere. Industries across the board are adopting this innovative and constantly evolving technology that has shown the potential to completely revitalize their efficiency.
Faced with an era of significant transformation, business leaders have been asked a very important question: do they want to survive, or do they want to thrive?
How to thrive amid the AI revolution
The key to thriving, rather than surviving, in the business ecosystem is maintaining a sense of adaptability. While this is often easier said than done, the most important thing a business leader can do to stay adaptable is embrace new technologies as they arrive. Although it is not always necessary to be an innovator, it is important to at least stay with the pack — even if you are not ahead of it.
Take artificial intelligence, for example. The companies that have found ways to responsibly implement the technology into their business model early already have a competitive advantage over their rivals. As innovative technologies become more widespread in their adoption, what was once novel becomes the status quo, and the companies that have refused to adopt this paradigm shift will be left behind.
As part of their commitment to adaptability, employers should invest in employee training, reskilling, and upskilling to ensure that no employee is left unemployed due to the proliferation of AI. Although artificial intelligence has shown great potential to automate the more monotonous (and often laborious) tasks of many industries, successful implementation of AI still requires an element of human oversight.
By training employees to work hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence, business leaders can create a harmonious system where human workers coexist with this powerful technology.
Why adopting AI benefits businesses
By streamlining these processes, businesses also have the potential to substantially reduce their overall costs. For one, automation tends to reduce the potential for human error in production processes. Although the output of an AI model is unlikely to be flawless, this is why businesses must invest in reskilling their workers for oversight and quality assurance positions. By reducing or eliminating mistakes, businesses can save time and money on correcting them.
That’s not to mention the optimization of production processes, which allows businesses to benefit from greater output and increased income. What may have taken a human worker several hours of labor could instead be completed in mere minutes by an automated system. If businesses reallocate the workers who would have staffed production to oversee even more automated production processes, they could exponentially multiply their productivity.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/ai-in-business/
Similarly, by automating the more monotonous tasks of workers’ duties, artificial intelligence can free up their time to perform other, more intensive tasks that require their full attention. For example, in many customer-facing professions, AI can be used to automate back-end tasks — such as paperwork — freeing the employee to do the more “human” aspects of their job, such as networking and relationship management.
Business leaders have also seen applications of artificial intelligence to inform data-driven decision-making for purposes such as research and predictive analytics. Since an AI model can process data much faster than a human ever could, it tends to be much more efficient at providing insights — and often to a more accurate, in-depth extent. An AI model could even peruse data from sources a human worker may not have discovered.
Artificial intelligence has an uncanny ability to tap into customer preferences and market trends through its data processing. By looking at both the big picture and individual data points, AI models can come to data-informed conclusions that businesses can use to advise their next move. From marketing plans to new product ideas, artificial intelligence is a great way to conduct efficient research on what might work.
Finally, many businesses have implemented artificial intelligence in a way that allows them to enhance the customer experience. For example, the use of an AI-powered chatbot for answering customer service questions could significantly improve the customer experience. By programming a chatbot with some of the most frequently asked questions a customer might have, those customers have a 24/7 resource to get the service they need. This saves human support teams time by diverting the simpler questions, and allows them to focus more on answering the complex questions too involved for the AI.
The challenges of adopting AI
Nevertheless, as is the case with any business decision, businesses must not forsake their long-term sustainability in favor of short-term productivity. One of the most important indicators of long-term success using artificial intelligence is a keen eye for the ethical considerations of the technology. Remember, the principle of “survive or thrive” extends far beyond profits — it requires maintaining the trust of all parties involved.
One of the main concerns about AI is data security. As part of its superior data processing capabilities, an AI model will analyze thousands or even millions of data points nearly instantaneously. While much of this data is publicly available, some of it comes from user-input sources. Because of this, it is important for users to be cognizant of what data they allow an AI model to access, only providing information that they would be willing to have used in the training of the model.
Image source: https://www.ibm.com/watson/resources/ai-adoption
Another essential consideration that AI adopters must remember is the responsible training of these models. It is important to remember that artificial intelligence maintains the bias with which it is trained and the data it is fed, so if a generative AI is trained with inaccurate information, those inaccuracies will be reflected in the model’s output. Steps must be taken to ensure that automation does not reflect the bias of human decisions or the historical and social inequities that permeate our culture.
Businesses that wish to adopt AI ethically must also ensure the transparency and fairness of their adoption. This approach is key to establishing trust with customers, stakeholders, and employees. Without significant transparency, these parties will all be susceptible to the feelings of paranoia that often go along with any substantial change — especially technological revolution. Customers will question their safety, stakeholders will consider efficiency, and employees will doubt their job security. Transparency is the best way to quell all these concerns.
In this era of unstoppable change, it would be reckless for business leaders to ignore the massive potential that artificial intelligence has to improve the efficiency of their businesses and employees. However, successfully adapting to this new paradigm requires a flexible mindset, with a steadfast commitment to embracing change in all its forms, while still maintaining a cautious eye to responsible practices.
About the Author: Ed Watal is an AI Thought Leader and Technology Investor. One of his key projects includes BigParser (an Ethical AI Platform and Data Commons for the World). He is also the founder of Intellibus, an INC 5000 “Top 100 Fastest Growing Software Firm” in the USA, and the lead faculty of AI Masterclass — a joint operation between NYU SPS and Intellibus. Forbes Books is collaborating with Watal on a seminal book on our AI Future. Board Members and C-level executives at the World's Largest Financial Institutions rely on him for strategic transformational advice.