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AI: An intelligent look at the future

There has been a great deal of discussion about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change the face of the business world. The technology is out of the box and businesses need to embrace it, or risk losing their competitive edge. But it’s not an all-or-nothing approach, you have to get the balance right – a level of using it, rather than it becoming homogenised and consequently invisible and the norm. Rather than something to fear, AI needs to be seen as a human efficiency improvement tool, not a replacement for existing methods.

Developed learning

AI is the science of making machines that can think like humans. They can do things that are considered ‘smart’, such as creating audio or writing, based on what is they have ‘learned’ from data. AI technology can process huge amounts of data very quickly, unlike humans who have to physically read and understand it or use programmes to process it. There is talk of AI being used to write music or books, with various formulae used as a basis – but what makes a successful piece of music or book? It seems that the eventual goal of AI is for it to be able to do tasks independently, such as recognise images and make decisions based on the information it has. There are already a huge range of different options available to businesses which are looking to explore the world of AI – but how can it help us in our day-to-day life now? We’ll look at a few examples.

The content generation

Microsoft Copilot, for instance, excels at smart document generation. It can handle data analysis in Excel, create presentations in PowerPoint, email management in Outlook and enhance collaboration in Teams. It’s hugely time-saving, which allows users to focus on more valuable activities and tasks. Using it provides AI-driven insights to all users, regardless of tech expertise. This is useful, but only if you use it well.

Google Genesis is good at automating news writing. It’s useful for content summaries, fact-checking and source validation, and can also produce personalised content. But AI doesn’t have a moral compass and using it to create content raises ethical considerations. For example an act can be legal to do, but in reality, morally wrong. It’s all about making that judgement call and most humans would know the difference. This would be a concern if we rely too heavily on AI-created content.

Questions answered

ChatGPT has been one aspect of AI that has been highlighted in the mainstream media. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It launched in 2022, based on the GPT-3.5 large language model. It’s multimodal, so can generate text, images and audio, and users can customise instructions and allow personalisation. It’s ideal for customer support, content creation, learning and research. As it can generate original material, or be interactive as an interactive tool, it’s great to help with FAQs or queries on a business’ website. Within the parameters of a set of predetermined answers, a chatbot can be as useful as talking to a human.

Where next?

When we look at what’s next for AI, we’ll see a convergence of technologies. There will be AI augmentation, with enhanced collaboration between humans and AI. However, aspects such as sense-checking documents written by AI will remain a human task. There’s no denying the efficiencies AI can introduce to business, but there’s a long way to go in terms of ethical regulation and regulatory improvements.