AI is becoming heavily integrated into almost every industry from healthcare to fashion. Many tasks can now be automated that would have seemed impossible to automate 10 years ago. But just because you can use AI to assist with a task doesn’t always mean that you should. Learning how to use AI efficiently and correctly is important. Below is a guide to the good, the bad and the ugly of AI integration in business.

The Good

Improving productivity

The best way to use AI in business is to improve productivity by automating mundane and time-consuming tasks. For example, business owners can use AI to speed up bookkeeping, keep track of employee absence/punctuality and automatically create staff rotas. Using an AI skills intelligence program, it’s even possible to assess and improve one’s own soft skills - essentially using AI as a mentor to become more productive.

Accelerating research

Many forms of research are now being greatly sped up by AI. There are AI tools to help with competitor analysis, medical research and product testing. And while factual accuracy of LLMs isn’t perfect, these tools are excellent for providing quick overviews on complex topics.

Reducing threats

AI is revolutionising cybersecurity by improving tasks like malware detection, phishing filtering and incident response. Real-time video analytics can also be used in some industries to detect threats. This type of AI can help actively keep businesses safer and more secure,

The Bad

Spreading misinformation

Some unscrupulous businesses have sadly been using AI to falsely advertise their product and make fraudulent claims. As generative AI becomes more advanced, this is going to become more commonplace - already some businesses are using AI video generation to create false demos of products and image generation to create photographs of fake business characters.

Handling core tasks

If clients are paying you to do a specific task, you cannot outsource this task to AI and take the credit. AI can be used to handle the admin, but no-one is going to want to pay a graphic design company to produce a logo using AI, when they can use AI to do this themselves.

Discussing sensitive matters

Tasks that involve emotional sensitivity are still best left in the hands of humans. This includes responding to complaints, dismissing employees and providing any form of counselling. Attempting to automate these tasks could make you appear cold and uncaring.

The Ugly

Content creation

Many companies are already using AI to generate blog content, promotional emails and even video adverts. AI can help speed up the content creation process, however obvious use of AI may put clients off and negatively impact search rankings. It all comes down to how AI is integrated - either the prompting has to be very good, or there needs to be some human involvement to stop it feeling artificial.

Customer service

A growing number of websites are using chatbots to help handle customer service. These chatbots can greatly reduce the demand on customer support agents, however it’s unwise to use them to replace human customer support entirely - not everyone wants to talk to a chatbot, and some issues are more complex and require talking to a human.

Screening resumes

Recruiters have been more commonly using AI tools to screen resumes. While this can be an effective way to narrow down applications, there is always a danger that good applicants will be filtered out just for not using the right keywords. Ultimately, there still needs to be some human screening involved.

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