Insights for Entrepreneurs Considering the AI Revolution

AI is here to stay and will impact the way we work and communicate; it is also likely to become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. As an owner of multiple businesses, it is critical for me to both understand AI and guide our customers on this journey.

In order to ensure we remained best in class in our industry, we ran a process to identify the world’s leading experts in AI (and marketing) to help us on our journey. After a comprehensive search, we identified Britney Muller, former data scientist at Moz and Head of Marketing at AI unicorn Hugging Face, as the best person globally for what we required; fortunately, we managed to secure her to be part of our team (remotely from New York). We recently brought her to New Zealand where she was the keynote speaker at Digital Day Out and spoke to a private group of senior people at an invite-only event at Google’s offices.

Through our learnings, here are 3 key takeaways that any business owner would benefit from considering:

AI is incredibly smart but also incredibly stupid!

Some things that AI can help with are amazing and so easy to use. Things like helping with coding, generating text ideas, images, and content ideas. However, this new breed of AI has been known to be inaccurate and also includes bias (because it learns from humans who are often inherently biased). For example, when Britney came to New Zealand, she asked Midjourney to create an image of the smartest person in New Zealand; each output was a white male with glasses!

One company developing an app to detect cancer was not getting the results they expected, despite the huge amount of training data they fed the system. After much head-scratching and efforts to find the problem, it turned out that the AI was determining which moles were cancerous by the ruler measuring the size of them in the pictures. If the image had a ruler, it was cancer; if it didn’t, it wasn’t! Incredibly smart, but also very stupid!

Get stuck in

The only way to really learn about this technology is to be curious and start using it. Have a play with the text generation and image generation tools; look at how different prompts get different outcomes. The interesting thing for me has been seeing all the different marketing software that purports to do all the work for you, saving huge amounts of time. Most of these, in my experience, have not been fit for purpose, and we wouldn’t consider using them in our business. Often, if it looks too good to be true…

ChatGPT and other generative AI

The way these work is that they predict the likelihood of the next word based on probability. They do not actually have independent thought or consideration in the same way as humans do. We have seen a lot of businesses utilising generative AI for their clients and publishing verbatim the results. This may be a quick, cheap, and easy solution to producing content; however, it is likely a race to the bottom and will cause your business problems in the long term. Try to use these text generators for ideation and assistance rather than trusting what they produce completely. You don’t want to be like the lawyer who cited a legal case that never actually existed because he used generative AI and did not validate the results!

There is no doubt that we are on the cusp of an AI revolution. ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and took off partly because it was so easy to use. When considering the implementation of AI in your business, try to consider how it will help deliver a more personalised and frictionless experience.