AI tools boost efficiency, automate tasks, improve engagement

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Artificial intelligence is already a game-changer for businesses of all sizes, from the local company with 20 employees to global conglomerates.

But if you haven’t implemented a strategy for using AI, it’s not too late. John Loury, president of Rochester-based data and analytics consulting firm Cause + Effect Strategy, has a checklist, starting with education.

Step 1: “You have to upscale yourself and your team by doing some research; identify local partners and advisors who can actually share some experiences and success stories,” Loury said. “Going it alone is lonely and can be very costly.”

Step 2: Are you ready from a data perspective? Do you have clean and structured data to train AI models?

“That’s going to be the first question that any software tool asks,” he said. “It really is the age-old concept of garbage in, garbage out, so you need to be prepared to take on any sort of AI technology.”

Step 3: Are you prepared from an ethical standpoint?

“You obviously want to maintain transparency in how you come to certain conclusions and you want to minimize bias as much as possible,” Loury advises. “And quite frankly in the finance area, certain things are illegal. You have to mask certain information around certain demographics.”

Step 4: Change management. Make sure everyone in your company understands AI’s role.

“You have a whole generation of people that, when they hear AI, they think about a certain movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 3: Rise of Machines) and that machines are coming for them,” he said.

Step 5: Realizing that AI tools are not a one-size-fits-all. “Try to find tools that align with your business size, your goals and your industry.”

Step 6: Create a roadmap. Prioritize the areas of your business that could benefit from AI based on the people and process and technology that you have today, he said.

“The current iteration of AI really focuses on automation,” Loury said. “If you’re doing a lot of clerical tasks — data entry and data processing, very rudimentary, fingers on keyboard — those are the sort of tasks that this current iteration of AI has come for.

“If you’re heavily into programming, AI has automated those processes. Customer support is another. Those are areas where this iteration of AI has come in and had a positive impact.”

Wilmac Technologies, headquartered in the Five Star Bank Building in downtown Rochester, provides customer service tools to a variety of businesses, starting with phone technology.

“You call in and you think you’re talking to a person but it’s really AI,” Wilmac president and CEO Steve McDonnell said.

Upwards of 30 percent of calls can be handled by the software “and that’s a big savings for a company and it’s a better experience for the customer,” he said.

But the product can also help track all calls, emails and interactions with customers

But the product can also help track all calls, emails and interactions with customers over the past 10 years, providing an analysis of the customer journey, McDonnell said.

“We’re helping companies determine how to engage with customers,” he said.

There are plenty of AI tools that small businesses can consider for internal processes. For example, Salesforce Einstein.

“Any company of 50 people or more could probably benefit from the use of Salesforce,” Loury said.

Another big-use case is in operations and supply chain, where AI can provide demand forecasting.

“AI models can help predict what those fluctuations will be,” Loury said. “A tool that we see a lot of customers using on the supply chain side is a Coupa. That’s a way to process invoices and approve and disprove certain financial aspects of a company.”

And you certainly don’t need to operate the technology field to take advantage of AI benefits.

“You could be a tool and die shop in Ontario, New York, and be using Tableau with Einstein AI to visualize data, you could be using Coupa for your invoice processing and you could be using HubSpot to help manage your outbound marketing efforts,” Loury said. “You would have three different solutions that would be tuned to a company of your size that are all infused with AI features and components. And it would require very little investment to do so.”

An even easier application is Microsoft Word’s Copilot. There’s a free version, but Cheryl Nelan, owner and president of managed service provider CMIT Solutions of Penfield, says it’s well worth upgrading to the pay version.

The application can assist with a variety of everyday document writing, from email to how-to instructions to your team.

“It used to take me hours to do those,” Nelan said. “Now I essentially send bullets to what I want it to say and tell Copilot ‘please write me a policy saying these things’ and it puts it in a beautiful-looking policy document that I review and tweak – and I can ask it to tweak it.

“It really reduces the amount of time I spend on the labor or writing something that is shareable. Things are in my head and I want to publicize it to my staff or I need to create a document that goes out to all of my clients, warning them about the latest threat or whatever the case may be.”

Copilot writes in full sentences and creates the document. And if it’s not the proper tone, Nelan says the user can ask for a tweak to make it more urgent, friendlier or softer.

If you’re unsure how an AI tool could help you, then experiment. “Just start playing with it,” Nelan said, “because you’ll find it can save you so much time.”

Nelan does suggest using caution, however. Assume that anything you ask could be seen and/or heard by someone at some point.

As you prepare instructions for ChatGPT, don’t simply use a search engine such as Google for information.

“ChatGPT learns from what you type in and then uses it,” Nelan said. “If you Google, ‘My company just developed this XYZ thing, what are the patents out there?’ there’s a risk that you divulged a company secret. It’s vague right now, it’s not like what you just typed is going to show up on the internet, but there is a risk because you’ve just put it out there and it’s no longer in control of just your company.”

Thus, she suggests approaching such searches the same way you would if you were having a conversation with an acquaintance outside of your company.

“You might talk to somebody and say, ‘Hey, we’re having this challenge’ and you might describe the challenge a little bit but you’re not going to talk about the company it’s affiliated with or any confidential information. You’re going to keep it very broad. If you keep your searches the same way, you can get valuable data yet protect your company.”

AI won’t be replacing the person who asked for the report or the how-to instructions. It’s simply providing more time for that person to concentrate on more important tasks.

For now, that is. Machines coming for jobs is no longer just some sci-fi concept, it could become reality through Agentic AI.

“That technology is being talked about today,” Loury said. “Agentic AI would tackle tasks, analyze the problems, provide solutions and develop strategies to achieve those outcomes with very little human interaction.

“Generative AI helps to create something from a bunch of things. I ask ChatGPT a question, it spits back stuff. Agentic AI can actually do. If you haven’t heard the term Agentic AI, you will very soon. It has the potential to critically think and make decisions. Whereas generative AI is giving you the plan, Agentic AI can actually execute on the plan, and that has real-world implications for people who previously would have been making those decisions.”

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