A Force For Good Or Evil? Entrepreneurs Discuss The Pros And Cons Of AI For Business

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating industries around the world. Employers have opinions about the impact of AI, and few are on the fence. Some are inspired, excited and seeing what they can create. Others are afraid, nervous and fight to stay relevant or ignore it completely.

I asked the entrepreneurs to explain whether they are excited or afraid of artificial intelligence, and shared their hopes and concerns.

Pro: Enhance creativity

There is a wealth of AI tools for every creative activity you want to start. For this reason, establishing a professional-looking business is easier than ever. Tools exist to create a brand, create a website, and create content in all formats. Creative ideas can go from concept to reality with just a few clicks.

Cameron Adams, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of change, believes that AI will fuel a massive explosion of creativity and efficiency for businesses, democratizing it and allowing people to tap into more creativity than they knew before. “Time is the most precious asset in our workday, and artificial intelligence is an incredible tool to have in your visual communication toolkit,” he said. He sees AI as not something that will completely do a job for you, but something that can “help make ideas flow, which will allow you to quickly go from an idea to a quality draft.” He added that AI can mean “you start with a better draft that increases the baseline for creative work” and that ultimately translates into more interesting and engaging results.

Chris Caffrey, founder of the Legacy Club, described artificial intelligence as “steroids for content”, saying that artificial intelligence “will enable entrepreneurs and their teams to engage new audiences and enhance their digital and content assets. marketing”. On a similar note, Nortey Razzi’s Neo Nortey uses AI in its business photography, enjoying that it has changed “the way we create and manipulate images, enabling new creative possibilities and improved workflow efficiency regardless of experience or budget”. In photography and other creative pursuits, AI means the artist can “spend more time on the creative aspects of their work, without compromising quality or incurring additional costs” and pass those results on to their clients.

Pro: Improved efficiency

Before the Internet there were checks to cash, letters to write by hand, and physical meetings to attend. After AI is incorporated, there seems to be no waiting. Entrepreneurs take every process in their business and cut out all the inefficiencies they can.

Vadim Solovey, CTO and co-founder of DoiT International is streamlining processes and optimizing resources to achieve maximum efficiency. “By integrating AI into the core of our services, we can better extract valuable insights from data and predict trends, make more informed decisions and achieve more effective results.” Within Solovey’s business, it has “routine tasks automated, freeing up talented team members to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of operations,” describing AI as “a supporting backbone” that enables the ‘company increase accuracy, reduce response times and scale better. .

Jim Harshaw, Jr of The Harshaw Group is applying this to content, using AI to “create higher quality content, faster” and describing the main benefit as “reducing cognitive bandwidth to start on tasks like creating content,” so he and his team can focus energy on other tasks within the business. “We use AI to write podcast titles, social media, and blog posts. While we still need to perfect AI-created content, it significantly reduces the workload.” Don White of Satisfi Labs is excited about the “boring things” that AI is doing within his business, such as “email and document creation software that has been a minimal but significant time saver” and “the ability to generate data that is easier.” to be consumed by technology partners, consumers and employees.” White has also been able to skip “some time-consuming stages of our product roadmap with the latest tools available now.”

Pro: Offer a better service

Removing humans removes human error. Cutting out the waffle speeds delivery. AI is helping some entrepreneurs better serve their customers. Teaching a machine to do tasks that were previously only done by a person makes it easier for a business to produce and service at scale.

Juno’s Ally Fekaiki is “excited about the potential of AI to improve the customer experience,” describing AI-powered tools like ChatGPT as “unlocking very sophisticated opportunities for world-class customer communications and user engagement” . Juno has integrated ChatGPT into its platform to “build an AI-enabled wellness planner that helps users achieve their goals.” The same product, add AI and better service results, a change that Fekaiki said “allows us to create meaningful and personalized user experiences so customers can get even more value from our products.” Do more for your customers for the same price, keep them coming back for more.

Specifically, for health and fitness entrepreneurs, AI is creating a multidimensional customer experience that exponentially improves service. Dr. Nora Khaldi, CEO and founder of Nuritas, said they “couldn’t achieve what we’re doing today without AI,” when talking about the “health-promoting molecules that AI allows us to discover.” Khaldi said artificial intelligence “makes it possible for us to unlock previously untapped ingredients from nature, allowing us to break the decades-long cycle of poor quality products that have created a wave of health problems for consumers.” Akash Vaghela, founder of RNT Fitness, adds that artificial intelligence. -assisted coaches can provide “even better recommendations than humans” because they can “analyze more data, consider more factors and use biofeedback to drive the best advice, in real time, proactively and reactively”, what he thinks it will mean. better results and free up space for coaches to “go even deeper into their clients’ lives.”

But what about the potential downsides of AI?

Cons: dehumanizing and impersonal

Not all entrepreneurs are convinced by artificial intelligence, and for all professionals there is also a downside. More automation means fewer jobs available, short-term gains can be offset by long-term headaches, not to mention adverse reactions that haven’t been considered.

Anna Hamill of And Hope Designs is “scared by the prospect of AI being used too much or incorrectly”, because she said: “people buy from people and they buy using their emotions”. Hamill worries that small business owners, in particular, will use AI to save time and “end up ruining a business that was human and had genuine emotion,” and believes that AI tools can make “the copy of the website and other aspects of a business sound robotic and not like the tone of voice your customers know and love.” Can AI-generated content really look human? And if customers suspect a bot is behind a brand, will it slow them down?

Charlie Day of Charlie Day Sales is also worried about “losing that personal connection, which is so important to making money as an entrepreneur.” He believes too many companies neglect “social selling and old-school marketing,” including phone calls, which are “really effective for me and the entrepreneurs I help.” Day believes chatbots and autoresponders give up the opportunity to build relationships, which he said is key to sales. “People buy from people, not AI,” he said. The solution is different for different types of businesses, so consider whether the human touch or the efficiency of AI is what your customers really want.

Against: Plagiarism and misinformation

GPT Chat, Midjourney, and several other content creation tools can help you generate articles and images in seconds, if directed correctly. But are these articles and images any good? Both bots and humans can create low-quality content, but humans need to sleep and eat at some point, while bots can just keep going.

Plagiarism and Google penalties are just a few of the concerns keeping employers up at night when it comes to AI. Merchant Machine’s Ian Wright is horrified by “how easy it is to create content without the sources behind it, because there’s no easy way to go back and fact-check.” He said that for medical terms or investment decisions, the impact of this could be huge.

William Green of Poem Analysis can “appreciate the anxiety that AI can produce, both to control it, what it means for online publishers, and to make fair use of the use of models of large datasets that have been used to train AI.” If everyone’s hard-earned content can only be used to train AI models, where does that leave creators? The legislation hasn’t caught up yet, so no one is sure.

Cons: Privacy and security issues

PressPitch.io’s Bilawal Gul is concerned about potential cyberattacks “that can cause significant harm to both businesses and individuals.” When AI is involved, “cyberattacks are difficult to defect and defend against, as they can adapt and evolve based on the defenses used against them.” Gul posed the question, “What would happen if an AI-powered virus became a ‘friend’ of our AI-powered defense system?” and predicts that this means “we will be at the mercy of ‘good AI’ and ‘bad AI’, unable to identify who to trust and how to get rid of them,” a situation he believes is “inevitable.” mess.”

The study of dystopian fiction indicates what the future of AI may hold. Relationships with chatbots, artificial friends who babysit, and recreating people after they’ve died can be some of the ways it infiltrates our personal lives. If our companies are allowed, what might those implications be? Access to bank accounts, journals and email conversations can open cans of worms that are best left closed.

To improve creativity, efficiency and better service benefits, there is also the possibility that AI will dehumanize a business, as well as spread misinformation and pose a serious risk. Is AI ultimately a force for good or evil and how do we take the best parts without the worst? Stay curious, think about what each update means, and be prepared to slow down for sustainability. Pivot and adapt without being reckless or ignoring the dangers.