An Intro to AI In Your Business
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For our last blog of the year, we wanted to start the conversation about AI and your business. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the hot topic in conversations with our clients, prospective clients, social settings, and every seminar we have attended this year. At Affinity Technology Partners, we are huge advocates of leveraging technology to empower our clients, but we also tend to take the stance of not being on the bleeding edge of new solutions, for the sake of security and to make sure we do not interrupt client workflow more than necessary. So what are the benefits of AI?
AI can help organizations gain an edge in today's highly competitive business landscape by increasing efficiency, productivity and profitability. When implemented correctly, it can improve customer service, enhance marketing efforts, optimize inventory management, streamline sales processes and more.
But implementing AI requires a strategic approach to ensure that it delivers the intended benefits while being practical, ethical and aligned with the overall business plan of your organization. We want to introduce best practices to successfully integrate AI into your business, and we have goals and resources allocated in the upcoming New Year to implement them successfully.
Best practices for leveraging AI successfully
1. Pick the best places to start
Identify critical business areas that AI can solve or add value to. By prioritizing key functions to automate and optimize, you can achieve a quick win and prove the value of AI integration to stakeholders.
2. Identify opportunities that may already be in place
What line of business applications or software do you use in your business that is already leveraging AI? How is it improving the product? What is the feedback from early adopters? Would it be worth paying the increased license amount for some members of your organization to test it? Affinity has assigned members of our team to use Microsoft CoPilot for the last few quarters to learn the product and understand how it will benefit our clients.
3. Ensure data quality and integrity
For the success of your AI strategy, your data must be clean, structured and complete. This will help your AI model deliver more accurate and valuable insights that improve the efficiency of your business processes and decision-making. It can be dangerous to turn on a feature such as AI without understanding its access to data in the organization. Affinity is working on AI readiness tools to ensure that AI does not cause more harm than good with our clients.
4. Be open to innovation and experimentation
AI technology is rapidly expanding, and the best way your business can truly reap the rewards of AI is by staying open to innovation and experimentation. By adopting new approaches and opportunities to innovate, you can find new ways to leverage the full potential of AI technology.
5. Get help and support from the experts
Transitioning to a new technology on your own can be challenging. That's why you should consider partnering with an IT service provider like Affinity to access the expertise and tools you need to ensure you implement best practices as per industry standards. We have already mentioned the dangers of AI capabilities accessing your company data. That is only one of the concerns that we have as we look at our clients adopting AI. We want to make sure it is tested and implemented with a plan for best results.
6. Think about the ethics
For the long-term success of your business, it’s crucial to use AI ethically and transparently, with clear accountability measures in place. Ensure that you use unbiased data and maintain transparency in the algorithm from the beginning. This will minimize risks and ethical challenges from popping up down the road. It is also necessary to know that depending on the AI tool, you may be sharing proprietary company information with people outside of your organization, so make sure you are not exposing your team without being aware.
Wondering how to get started?
Figuring out where AI can fit within your business can be challenging. We look forward to working with our clients in the New Year on the right strategies to make AI implementation a success. If you are not an Affinity client, we’d love to help empower your organization through technology. Stay tuned for more information on implementing and leveraging AI in your business…This conversation is not going away any time soon!
