How To Incorporate AI Into Your Business

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming business operations—rapidly.

Even if you've never written a line of code in your life, you can now use AI to make your business operations faster and more efficient.

In this guide, we'll go over the potential benefits of AI in the workplace as well as discuss what to consider before launching a full-scale digital transformation.

Understanding AI and its potential

One thing that makes AI remarkable—compared to innovations that have come before—is the speed at which it advances. The computer models that power AI-enabled tools learn more and more about the way we work each time we interact with them.

These models can also feel eerily human-like. Communicating with a generative AI tool like OpenAI’s ChatGPT often seems very similar to chatting with a person.

As a result, it may seem that a tool like ChatGPT can make independent decisions—but it can't. This is an experience created by natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs). In other words, it’s math and code, not magic.

Right now, AI is a tool just like any other software you might use at work … albeit a powerful one. AI capabilities are a complement to human intelligence, creativity, and attention to detail—not a replacement.

By combining your skills with the processing power of AI algorithms, you could see several workplace benefits.

Listen to Work Week: How Can AI Help Workers and Organizations Thrive?

Improved operational efficiency

Think about the most routine and time-consuming task you do at work. Perhaps it's sorting and checking email or running a specific report every Friday morning.

Now consider how much time you spend on this task—including thinking about it, talking about it, planning for it, executing it, and following up on it.

Chances are, it takes up a lot of your workday and causes frustration. You aren't alone in this. The Upwork Research Institute found that 71% of full-time employees feel burned out, and 65% struggle with productivity demands in the workplace.

When used effectively, AI can help to relieve this burnout. By removing part of the burden of repetitive tasks, you and your team members have more time to focus on creative and strategic work—not routine tasks. (If you push for AI adoption at your company without following the steps discussed here, though, you may run the risk of increasing, not reducing, burnout due to the stress of a new or confusing tool.)

Once you understand how to prompt, or interact with, your AI-driven tool of choice, you could use it to do things like:

• Build workflows for repetitive tasks like data entry
• Process customer data and find patterns
• Summarize long documents into digestible bullet points
• Generate reports and charts for key stakeholders
• Improve customer satisfaction by quickly assigning support tickets
• Streamline the process of collecting information from customers
• Scan CRM data for duplicate entries
• Check and update lines of code
• Brainstorm social media post ideas
• Employ predictive analytics to help with problem-solving

While the AI takes care of those tasks, you can more efficiently manage projects, work to launch new products faster, hire new team members, improve your marketing strategy, or explore something that interests you.

Enhanced decision-making

AI tools are trained using data—and they're great at processing more of it at speeds that outstrip human capabilities.

Anthropic fed its Claude AI language model the complete text of “The Great Gatsby”—over 47,000 words. There was just one catch: Their team added a line about Mr. Gatsby being a software engineer working at Anthropic. Claude processed the entire book and identified the erroneous text … in 22 seconds.

You could harness this kind of processing power to identify the following in your company's data:

• Duplicates
• Errors
• Trends
• Patterns
• Outliers

From there, you might ask the AI application to classify and organize your data further—even to the point of predicting future outcomes based on existing patterns. 

Increased competitiveness

AI can also help your company keep its competitive edge in several ways. The speed at which AI tools can process data means that you can more easily:

• Repurpose old social media content into new marketing campaign assets
• Create digital products 
• Predict potential supply chain slowdowns
• Offer users personalized experiences
• Boost e-commerce conversions with product recommendations
• Conduct customer sentiment analysis
• Provide after-hours customer support via AI-powered chatbots

Start here: Assess your business needs

If you're getting excited about the potential business benefits that AI can bring, you might want to get started and integrate this tech as quickly as possible.

But you’ll want to pause and take a moment to consider your business needs first. 

Analyze current processes

Integrating AI into your business functions can come with a price tag, so make sure you’re maximizing the return on your investment. One way to do this is by identifying the areas in your business where AI can boost efficiency or cut existing costs the most.

First, think about sticking points in your business—processes and operations that may be impacted by bottlenecks and delays. Next, think about tasks that are data-heavy, routine, and even done in duplicate throughout your company. 

These are all good places to start experimenting with AI. For example:

• A growing startup's marketing team may use AI automation to send emails to new inbound leads and then move the contact to a new pipeline stage.
• In a manufacturing environment, teams may use AI to help collect and interpret data that shows how well their equipment is working.
• A large payment processing company may use AI algorithms to improve their fraud detection capabilities and flag suspicious transactions.
• The human resources manager at a small business may use AI process automation to review, sort, and categorize data about how quickly their team can fill open positions.
• Independent business owners may use AI-enabled spreadsheets to help with inventory management, supply forecasting, and other types of data analysis.

Set clear objectives

Once you know what you’d like to optimize with AI, consider what you intend to achieve with the tool. 

Think about:

• What’s the best-case result of incorporating AI? This could be something like a certain amount of money saved in a quarter or time shorn off routine processes.
• How will you measure its success? To assess how helpful an AI tool is, you’ll want to come up with a quantifiable way to measure its performance.
• How does the tool align with your business strategy? When you develop a list of AI tools to consider, evaluate how each tool aligns with your company's vision—as well as your existing tech stack. 
• How can you establish guidelines around ethical use of AI tools? UNESCO’s 10 ethical AI principles include data privacy, ensuring no harm to others, non-discrimination, and transparency among other key points. Their list can be a good starting point for other organizations seeking to establish AI governance guidelines.

Choose the right AI solution: off-the-shelf vs. custom

When integrating AI into your business, you have two main options: Use an off-the-shelf tool that already exists or work with a machine learning engineer to create a custom AI solution.

Off-the-shelf AI tools

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Custom AI Solutions

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Remember to evaluate AI vendors and engineers

Whether you opt for an off-the-shelf or custom solution, doing your due diligence to find the right vendor or service provider is key.

Choosing an off-the-shelf tool

According to the MIT Sloan Management Review, one of the most important factors you can consider when evaluating an existing AI tool is how the AI has been trained. The AI model's “ground truth”—what it understands to be the correct answer to a problem—influences its other outputs.

While vendors might not be ready to let you have a peek at the entire inner workings of their AI system, you'll want to be satisfied with their answers to questions like:

• What LLM is your tool using?
• On what types of datasets was your tool trained?
• How is our input data processed, stored, and used?
• How will you comply with industry-specific policies (like HIPAA for U.S. health care data)? 
• How much can we customize this tool?
• How easy is it to customize?
• What kind of initial and ongoing support do you provide?
• Who owns the copyright to the AI's outputs?

You may also want to conduct your own research online to see what other users of the tool are saying about their experiences—and how satisfied they are.

Working with an engineer

If you feel that a custom solution is the best option for your business, you'll need to hire an artificial intelligence pro or freelance machine learning engineer to help you build it out.

When chatting with potential candidates who can help, ask questions like:

• How long have you been working with AI?
• What are some projects you've worked on that are like what we need?
• What LLMs and machine learning algorithms do you use when building a custom solution?
• Will our data be stored and processed locally? Who can access it?
• What data security practices do you follow during your work?
• Are you able to help us integrate the tool with our existing tech stack?
• What ongoing support can you offer after the tool is complete?
• What's your expected timeline to complete a project like this?
• What's your pricing structure for this work?

And, if you aren't sure whether an off-the-shelf or custom solution is best for your needs, you can always book a consultation with an AI professional to get their opinion on the best course of action.‍

Prepare your team for AI integration

Successful AI integration isn't just about picking the right tool—it also involves preparing your team members to use the AI most effectively. 

Change management

To start, communicate the reason behind the AI integration to your team. Let them know:

• Your goals for using the tool
• Why you selected this AI software
• How AI can help to make their jobs easier
• What you're excited to focus your team's attention on while AI handles some of their more routine tasks

Make sure that you share with your team know where they can turn with any comments, questions, suggestions, or concerns about AI use in the workplace. 

Employee training and development

You'll also want to make time to train your team on key aspects of both the specific tool you've chosen or built as well as guidelines for AI prompting.

For example, a customer service team may need to know:

• The key phrases AI is searching for in call transcripts
• When and how the AI tool will flag, move, or otherwise identify customers and tickets in your system
• How they can structure their requests to the AI software to receive the best output
• What AI technology can't do—tasks that still require a careful human touch

While it may be tempting to upskill your entire team to become AI experts, this isn't the best way to approach your integration.

Your team members have jobs they already do—devoting more of their working hours to AI upskilling could reduce output, not add to it.

Equipping your team with a solid foundation in AI usage basics—and creating a culture of continuous learning through study and experimentation—is a good place to start. 

An instructional designer on Reddit suggests that “instead of abstract concepts, show how AI can solve actual company problems. If employees see how it makes their jobs easier, they’ll be more engaged.” 

Another user suggests that companies start introducing AI by having team members practice on existing materials. 

“I did this for my organization recently,” the user said. “We made (employees) turn policy documents into podcasts … and created a pool of such problems for them to solve. Not only did they learn how to use AI, they also learned how to seek out new AI tools for other uses.”

Get help implementing AI in your business processes

It's becoming clear that AI is a big part of the future of business. If you're not clear on the best way for your company to use AI going forward, consider bringing in an artificial intelligence engineer to help you clarify when, how, and why you're using AI at work. These freelancers are skilled in identifying the most productive real-world ways to use AI.

Whether you need help choosing an off-the-shelf solution or want someone to help you ideate and build a custom product, the AI and machine learning engineers on Upwork can help. Log in to Upwork and create your first job post now to connect with skilled professionals who can bring their AI experience to your team.

And, if you're an AI freelancer looking for their next project, check out all the artificial intelligence and machine learning jobs available on Upwork right now. It's simple to get started—just create an Upwork account and begin sending proposals or offering consultations.

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Upwork does not control, operate, or sponsor the tools or services discussed in this article, which are only provided as potential options. Each reader and company should take the time to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.