The SMB Guide to Generative AI: What it is and what it means for small to medium businesses
If you’re a business owner or manager, you’re surely familiar with those two letters by now:
AI.
The business world is abuzz with talk of Artificial Intelligence. Your colleagues are discussing it and there’s a good chance your competitors are adopting it.
This may leave you a little worried or confused.
You want to keep up with AI, but you’re left wondering: “What exactly is it? How does it work and how can I use it for commercial purposes?”
We’ve had a lot of clients coming to us with these questions.
So, we’ve gone and put together this short Generative AI guide for businesses, outlining:
- What Generative AI is
- How Generative AI works
- How you can apply AI to your business.
Our aim is to demystify this exciting and powerful new tool and leave you with a few ideas about how you can adopt AI in your business.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is an AI platform that produces creative output from a prompt – as the name suggests.
What sets Generative AI apart from most of the other generic AI types is its ability to learn and mimic human creativity. The most popular example is ChatGPT.
Generative AI (Gen AI) is trained on enormous data sets. It behaves a lot more like a human brain, capable of learning patterns within the data available to it. It uses this to generate new content more organically, and can even vary the iterations of that content.
This is why it can be used to generate somewhat unique content in many formats including music, stories, images, and computer code.
That’s all well and good, but how can businesses use it?
How does Generative AI work?
Generative AI works by learning from large datasets.
The more information you can train it on, the better results you will be able to gain from it. It uses deep learning models or neural networks to generate original content based on patterns it sees in the datasets provided.
Learning happens over time as you provide it with more information and feedback for it to practice on; no different from how we humans learn.
Once trained, the Generative AI platform will be able to better understand what you want from it and deliver far more desirable results.
So, you can already imagine what Gen AI may be able to do for your business.
Implications for generative AI in your business
With the rapid adoption of AI in business going on right now, it has almost become a matter of “get on board or get left behind.”
You might be forgiven for being a little late to the program but failing to show up at all may prove detrimental to your business in the future. So much so, that even employees are no longer waiting for their managers to catch up; as they themselves are already seeing how they can boost their own productivity and efficiency at work.
Like the printing press in the 15th century, Generative AI is dramatically changing the way we do things in business; it’s here to stay and it’s only going to get better.
This means business owners and managers are going to need to understand this new tool and improve how they apply it to their business.
Commercial Applications for Generative AI
The commercial uses for Generative AI are limited only by your imagination.
Gen AI is a powerful creative tool and can be used to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The best results come when you provide as much business data as possible, highly specific and well-written prompts, and refine the final output.
Here are some common applications currently being used by Australian SMBs:
- Content Creation: Generate marketing and social media content, blog posts, and product descriptions.
- Customer Support: Chatbots, responses to customer inquiries, and automating communications.
- Creativity and Design: Create new design ideas, and visuals for marketing initiatives or product concepts.
- Data Analysis and Reporting: Summarise reports, create data-driven insights, and help with parts of the decision-making process.
All these solutions are generated based on the extensive volumes of data these businesses have on their ideal customer profile, sales history, and psychographics.
Practical Tips to implement Generative AI in your business
- Assess your needs to identify what areas of your business could be made more efficient by AI.
- Choose the right platform that can be a reliable productivity partner for your business.
- Start small and scale as you get comfortable.
- Collate all relevant data on your business and your ideal clients to help train the AI on how to best help.
- Begin with a small ‘pilot’ project to test the effectiveness of AI in your specific context.
- Seek out expert tech advice. It will save your business a lot of time, money, and frustration in the long run.
- Encourage ongoing learning and refinement of processes.
It’s important to remember that generative AI lacks true human understanding and empathy.
This can often show through in even the best final product. So, it is still important for your team to oversee everything and be very hands-on in using and refining outputs.
While it’s no silver bullet for a successful business, nothing comes closer than generative AI paired with a savvy user – and savvy business’ get the help of tech experts like us.
Centrix are experts in helping businesses understand and use Generative AI in their business.
We understand that Generative AI is very new and feels intimidating to a lot of business owners. Learning how to apply it to your business can be overwhelming.
But it’s worth it.
That’s why our team at Centrix is always ready – we help small businesses and large organisations get up to speed with all the latest technology, including Generative AI.
Backed by our extensive knowledge and expertise, Centrix is here to support your organisation with comprehensive solutions, as well as IT Connectivity and Collaboration Service Packages, Cloud IT, Cybersecurity Protection, Managed IT Services , and other IT Solutions.
To learn more, book an IT Health Check or contact us today.