CEO of Blough Tech a nationally recognized IT service company focused on helping small business solve their problems through technology.
You cannot read the news without encountering an article on how AI is transforming the world. There is a lot of hype surrounding AI, both dystopian and utopian. According to this hype, AI is going to destroy us all, or AI is going to usher in paradise.
I suspect that neither extremist view is accurate. We are in a period of accelerated change where AI tools are becoming better and more useful. So, what does the average small business need to consider when it comes to all this AI hype?
1. Don’t Count AI Out
First, don’t discount AI’s importance today. This is not a technology that you can afford to ignore. Like it or not, AI enhanced tech is here to stay. This isn’t a fad.
Small businesses must take time to explore AI and consider how they can use it to enhance their business. Their competitors certainly are. Right now, with simple prompting, AI can make small businesses more efficient by quickly creating rough drafts of documents, helping answer research questions and analyzing unstructured data and pull out useful insights.
These are just a few of the use cases already available today.
2. Don’t Forget AI’s Effect On Security
Next, don’t underestimate the importance of considering AI’s impact on your IT security. The bad guys are already using AI. Whether they are using AI to help write programs to exploit vulnerabilities minutes after they have been discovered or using AI to alter someone’s voice or even image in real time to perpetrate fraud, AI is accelerated businesses need for solid IT security tools, policies and training.
If a business is too small to have a team of IT specialists, they should consider partnering with one of the many excellent managed service providers who specialize in helping small businesses with their IT needs.
Adopting AI in your business also requires security planning. The LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT can reach into your unstructured data to help you discover a goldmine worth of data, but the same systems can also unintentionally expose highly sensitive information to the wrong people. Labeling your documents and setting up appropriate restrictions for what the AI can access and report on are critical before you implement it widely.
You also need to be mindful of what you allow to be ingested into these AI LLM agents. Uploading files to them can add those files to their training database and unintentionally expose them publicly if you don’t restrict that.
3. Focus On AI Training
Lastly, like any new technology, AI requires new skills and new training to be effective. Simply purchasing AI tools without investing in training your team on how to use them is only going to cause frustration and certainly won’t achieve the promised efficiency gains.
You will need to invest is reskilling your team, especially in prompt engineering—that’s the art of creating the perfect prompt to get the most out of the AI agents. Education, consulting and coaching must be incorporated into your overall AI strategy to guarantee the most success.
Like any new technology, it can seem overwhelming at first, but despite the challenges, the potential payoffs that come with AI make it well worth the extra effort.
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