Artificial intelligence is everywhere. No matter if you are in school or have had a career for a lifetime, artificial intelligence is impacting you in some way. There are many mixed opinions, and while we are not here to tell you what is right we hope to give you some clarity on what it is, how Fix & Form uses AI in business, and how it can be used for good.
What is Artificial Intelligence
You might have a general idea of what artificial intelligence is as a concept, but what is the real definition? According to the Oxford Dictionary, “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” In simpler terms, it is training a computer to be human-like. You may also have heard of machine learning. This is different from AI in the sense that it is a specific subset of AI that enables machines to learn from data without explicit programming. Some examples of AI and machine learning are ChatGPT, virtual assistance such as Siri or Alexa, Google Translate, facial recognition programs, and self-driving cars.
Artificial Intelligence: A Simple Illustration
A simple illustration to help you really grasp artificial intelligence is to think of the carplay screen in new cars. Marketing analytics uses a combination of descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, descriptive and then AI and machine learning. Descriptive analytics include features such as the time stamp and battery life, indicators that describe the past. Predictive analytics are past models that predict the future, such as when you get in the car and the GPA feature already predicts where you might be going next. Prescriptive analytics then create what it would consider the best course of action taking into account both descriptive and predictive analytics. For the Apple Carplay example, this could be the map itself suggesting a new route based on time and safety. Finally, analytics ties everything together with what we are now familiar with as artificial intelligence. The Apple Carplay is advancing using machine learning to predict, personalize, and automate the entire experience. An example would be if it seemed you were running early for work, or you are going on what appeared to be a long road trip, your Apple Carplay may pull up options of nearby coffee shops encouraging you to do something that you might not do otherwise. The combination of features like siri, maps and more make your car feel “human like,” acting as your personal assistant.
AI in Business Fix & Form Style
How is artificial intelligence used in business? In a general sense, everywhere, all the time.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management, or CRM, refers to the process of analyzing the customer interactions that take place through the customer life cycle. CRM is critical for any business, because without strong CRM, there is no room for growth. AI advances CRM through forecasting consumer behavior, creating more personalization and accuracy is serving customer needs.
Efficient Process and Optimization
Artificial Intelligence is gaining traction for its ability to make processes more efficient and optimize productivity. At Fix & Form, we utilize multiple AI platforms that help optimize our processes such Otter.ai. Every meeting we have we use Otter.ai as our note taker and then are able to summarize each meeting efficiently. It is especially helpful when we create transcripts form interview style interactions and then use the AI to organize those thoughts into important notes for future meetings, blogs etc.
Content Creation
Content creation is no doubt an unexplored territory with AI. There are endless possibilities that it creates. However, it is important to note that AI does not replace human creativity. It aids in it. AI takes the nitty gritty processes and creates a faster way of brainstorming, outlining, beginning research, organizing, and creating. While AI can be a great tool in business, it is only as useful as the prompt and direction you give it. Hence, there is even a need for creativity in prompting AI to be creative.
Market Research
Artificial intelligence is also great for market research. It speeds up the process and organizes thoughts and notes for you. Instead of thousands of spreadsheets of data and surveys, AI can summarize and pull insights for you. Additionally, AI helps to spot patterns of behavior in your consumers, workflow, trends, and competitors. AI can act as a second-hand man tool, providing support you never knew you needed. At Fix & Form, AI has helped streamline the research process significantly for competitors and industry trends, as well as editing tools to increase writing cohesiveness.
The Pros and Cons of AI in Business
Artificial Intelligence is taking the world by storm. But, what does this really look like in terms of pros and cons that come from it? Where is the trade off in being human like and automized?
Pros
Why are businesses leaning more and more on artificial intelligence? One main reason is the predictive analytics, or personalization it provides described early in the Apple Carplay example. The increased efficiency and productivity artificial intelligence has provided has been game changing to the world of business making once time consuming tasks automized. Another benefit to using AI in business is its overall competitive advantage it provides. From producing new capabilities, creating a cost reduction with its ability to streamline tasks, to overall new idea creation there are many advantages to looking into using AI in your own business.
Cons
Perhaps the most obvious answer to the benefits and drawbacks of AI is from the ethical standpoint. We previously mentioned the ability to properly prompt the generator to create ideas but then be able to also accurately cite artificially generated ideas. Another con to AI is it is not 100% accurate. There is still so much to be learned with it that with the human intelligence aiding in processing the Ai generated results, costly mistakes can be made. Another con that stems from inaccuracy is the overuse and dependency. There is question on how many jobs will be replaced with AI or the overall quality of projects and while the full extent of these concerns is still up in the air, there is validity in them.
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