Congratulations to The Listing for 20 glorious years – I’ve been reading it since the start, and am proud to be one of the regular contributors.
Today I’m talking about how best to use AI ‘artificial intelligence’ in business.
Treat AI as a bright new school leaver who’s just joined your team. They’re intelligent, enthusiastic and fast – but with very little real-world experience.
They get the work done in double-quick time, but they don’t know how to evaluate it. Use them for initial fact-finding, and to provide food-for-thought as a starting point.
And then you must always critically assess their results, based on your insight and wisdom.
And to reduce the number of times you have to ‘send work back’, it is important to make your instructions very clear. It’s really useful to tell AI who you want it to think like – let me give you an example.
I recently uploaded a draft marketing strategy and asked the AI ‘If you were one of my competitors, what actions might you take to effectively compete against this strategy? And how can I change the strategy now, to mitigate against those potential future actions?’
And then, crucially, I used my wisdom to evaluate the answers, and develop the strategy further.
Another time, I asked AI to summarise its own strengths and weaknesses, so here (with a little editing from me) is what it said:
• Start with a clear purpose, e.g. you want to save time, improve service, or make better decisions.
• Begin small, test ideas, and adjust as you go – look out for biased data (it is simply trawling the internet…).
• AI makes the good better — and the bad worse. Keep it ethical, purposeful, and guided by human judgment.
What do you think?
