Since the release of the recent mainstream AI platforms in the last couple of months it is clear to many that artificial intelligence technology is going to be embedded deeply into our lives but just how quickly are Kiwi businesses going to adopt the technology?
If companies start adopting the tech and integrating it into their businesses they have the ability to be much more efficient and outperform their competitors leading to increased margins & greater market share. There isn’t a single industry that isn’t going to get touched by AI over the next couple of years so the sooner companies adopt the tech the larger the head start they will have when their competitors decide to join the race. Imagine as a business owner having leverage over a competitor where your costs are lower and you can deliver more to a client in a shorter period of time, this is what AI empowers companies to be able to achieve right now.
But unfortunately I’m not seeing large adoption of the tech because sadly too many companies in Canterbury are reactive to change rather than being proactive, cyber security is a sad example of this where companies finally put measures in place only after a catastrophic event that has cost them orders of magnitude what the preventative measures would have been. I have seen small pockets of companies say that they are playing with tools like Chat GPT but they haven’t taken it too seriously.
What companies need to do is sit all the staff down and have a brainstorming session with colleagues to start giving hands on time playing with the apps, learn what they can do and then think about ways they can implement AI into their companies to become more efficient and utilise this tool as a distinct advantage over their competitors. Yes some of the content coming from things like Chat GPT can be a bit average at times but it gets the majority of the content correct and you can fine tune it, give it better prompts or just use the output as a starting point.
When Chat GPT went offline the other week, because it was over-subscribed, it left me feeling like I had just lost a virtual assistant. You normally don’t realise how much you rely on something until it is gone and I had been using it quite heavily as a research tool and to help me create business documents.
So what do we need to see? We need to see a lot of new startups or tech companies pivot. The need to for people to teach and explain AI tools to companies & their employees is going to be huge, it is going to be long lasting because it isn’t just a flash in the pan tech like Y2k once was. Over time the evolution of these new companies will change from teaching the basics like how to use Chat GPT into more advanced AI integrations in their current systems beyond just setting up chat bots.
So if you are a business owner I would encourage you to sit down with your team for an hour or two and start playing and brainstorming about how you can have an unfair advantage over your competition by embracing AI into your workflow. The real winners are going to be the proactive companies vs the reactive companies, having a competitive edge even for just a short time can sometimes give you the gap that keeps you ahead of the rest.
