Could your business save money with AI?

Deploying Ai To Save Your Business Money

The key to successfully implementing AI tools in your business lies in understanding the types of AI available and how they can best serve your specific business needs. Broad AI refers to a machine able to understand, learn, and implement any intellectual task a human can. While we’re not quite there yet, it’s the eventual goal of many AI researchers. Narrow AI, also known as weak AI, is currently the most widely deployed form of AI. It’s designed to perform narrow tasks such as facial recognition, voice commands, or car driving. Siri, Google Assistant, and even your Netflix recommendations are all forms of narrow AI. They’re like the diligent employees of the AI world, doing their specific tasks reliably and well.

Lastly, there’s Generative AI (GenAI). These systems generate new content, whether it’s a news article, a piece of music, a marketing plan or a piece of code. Tools like Bard, Claude, or ChatGPT are key players in this area. These are the creative geniuses of the AI workforce, capable of producing content from scratch. While this might all sound a bit futuristic, these tools are now easily accessible and deployable in any business, regardless of size or sector. They can drive efficiencies, enhance productivity, and most importantly, save you a significant amount of money.

GENAI: YOUR NEW MARKETING MANAGER

Arguably one of the most established ways to deploy AI in your business is to use it to create marketing plans and content. GenAI tools like Bard, Claude or ChatGPT have broad uses for marketing, meaning they can be used to do anything from writing a marketing plan to creating search engine-optimised product descriptions for your website. There are also a range of more specific tools, like CopyAI, Jasper or MidJourney, that can be used for specific functions like copywriting or creating bespoke imagery for your website and marketing materials. To use GenAI to save money on marketing, try asking it to help you develop a marketing plan. Having a plan in place will save you money by focusing your marketing efforts on the activities most likely to positively impact your bottom line. Alternatively, GenAI is already very good at producing written content like product descriptions, blog posts and social media posts. While the blog posts won’t be winning any Pulitzers just yet, using AI to produce SEO-friendly content or to ‘repurpose’ content (a fancy way of saying that you’ve turned a blog post into social media posts, for example) can save businesses owners and marketing managers a significant amount of time and money.

Ai Support For Hr And Legal Teams

In April of this year, AI researchers announced what they called “a watershed moment” after they deployed OpenAI’s GPT4 (the latest generation Large Language Model) to take and pass the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) – the main law exam in the US. GPT-4 didn’t just scrape by – it scored higher than 90% of real students. While this doesn’t mean that GPT-4 can replace your lawyer (yet), it does provide some cost-cutting opportunities. For example, businesses can employ AI for drafting contracts. AI tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated in understanding and generating legal language. They can efficiently create standard contracts or review and flag nonstandard wording or clauses in documents that might otherwise escape notice. AI can also help companies stay compliant with changing regulations, reducing the risk of costly lawsuits and fines. Compliance AI tools can monitor changes in laws and regulations across multiple jurisdictions, ensuring that your company’s policies and practices remain up-to-date. In HR, AI can streamline and automate tasks such as screening CVs, scheduling interviews, onboarding new hires, and managing employee benefits. Meanwhile, AI-powered chatbots can also provide instant responses to common HR queries, improving the employee experience while saving time and money. Both developments can reduce the administrative burden on HR teams and help them focus on strategic initiatives.

The Role Of Ai In Data Analytics And Finance

Imagine if anyone in your company could open up a spreadsheet and within a few minutes have the answer to important questions like how do our sales compare to the previous quarter? or if we continue on the same trajectory, what will our profits be in 2025? Previously, you needed to understand finances to ‘read’ a financial forecast or P&L, and you needed to know a language like Python to be able to query your organisation’s databases. Now, Natural language Processing (NLP) means that anyone in your business can interrogate your data, using plain language. As NLP continues to improve, anyone will be able to look at a spreadsheet or database and understand what it means for your company. Not only can this save you money on expensive external support, but transparency about business expenditure can also fuel cost savings and inform decision-making amongst your senior management team. It’s even possible to test out what will happen to your bottom line if you make specific changes – like if we switch to a cheaper supplier of widgets or if I hire another engineer. So if you are thinking about making big changes in your business, you can predict what will happen and – hopefully – avoid expensive mistakes.

Some tools, such as Rows, have already built in AI assistance to their spreadsheet software, and with Microsoft investing heavily in AI (including OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT), expect to see some major changes to Excel in the near future.

Combining Ai With Nocode Tools

NoCode tools have been around for a few years and have gained popularity quickly amongst business users. NoCode tools let people build websites, apps and software without writing any code, and these have recently received a power-up with the integration of

AI capabilities. Now, not only can you build your own apps – things like bespoke CRMs or customer portals - for your business without outsourcing the development to an expensive agency, but you can also add extensive customisation with AI-generated code. Some small business owners have even been able to create their own plugins or software by asking Bard or ChatGPT’s code generator to write the code needed to perform complex tasks. Want to customise an off-the-shelf website template? Ask Bard for the CSS code you need. Want to alter a workflow in Salesforce? ChatGPT’s code generator can write the Python script for you. Traditional app development can easily run to tens of thousands of pounds, while updating and maintaining software like Salesforce can set you back £500 per day for a consultant. While there is a bit of a learning curve with most NoCode tools, combining them with GenAI could mean launching your app without needing a five-figure budget.

What To Watch Out For

There are some issues that businesses need to watch out for when deploying AI. Saving a few pounds on law fees means nothing if you end up fined by the ICO for breaching GDPR. Businesses need to be careful about what information they share with AI tools to ensure they are still following their data privacy policies and not sharing confidential information with the companies behind tools like Bard and ChatGPT. It’s also important to understand that GenAI tends to ‘hallucinate’, meaning what it tells you may not be real (even if it sounds convincing). This could harm your reputation if you inadvertently share something that’s ‘made up’. It’s also worth noting that while AI can drastically reduce costs and improve efficiency, it doesn’t eliminate the need for human oversight. AI tools should be used to augment human skills, not replace them. Businesses may need to initially invest in training to ensure their staff are reaping the maximum benefits from AI.