AI can save time and money — if businesses use it wisely

AI is a tool that has been growing rapidly over the last few years and Graeme Barrie, founder of Netmechanics, said business owners need to take a minute to understand what AI can do for them.

Barrie has been in the tech industry for 30 years, and when he started his own business in 2016 it was focused on security. “In the last year a lot of the clients have been shifting their focus to AI, and that comes with a whole line of concerns around security and data protection.”

He said AI is evolving so quickly that it has become harder for businesses to keep up.

“I’m helping companies defend against AI-driven attack and phishing attacks that have been generated by AI. There’s a lot less grammatical errors than we used to see, and now there’s deep fakes, and even audio and video deep fakes, that’s becoming more and more of an issue of fraud.”

Historically he’s found that businesses could get away with only updating their software once a month to protect against data breaches, but it’s simply not enough anymore. “(The scammers are) tugging on our emotions to create that sense of urgency and danger, to get us to react too quick and click the link, or whatever. The security companies are building AI tools to help scan those, make sure they don’t make it to our inbox, but we’re still three steps behind,” Barrie said.

On top of security, he helps advise businesses how to implement AI into their everyday operations. “A lot of companies feel like they fall behind if they don’t use AI to build their business or expand their sales because that’s what we’re being bombarded with online.”

Barrie has heard stories where business owners put information with personal data into different AI platforms.

His advice for business owners to start implementing AI into something that is repetitive in the business, like writing emails and do a trial run using AI to do that task. “Then at the end of the 60 or 90-day period you can reevaluate” and figure out if it saved time and money or earned the business money.

If it’s doing either of those things, it might be beneficial to keep AI running that task. However, if it’s not saving time, or losing a business money, look elsewhere for where to implement AI.

He’s found that some business owners want to use AI just for the sake of using it. “We still need to run a business and make money. We can’t just be chasing the shiny objects, and that’s what I’m finding a lot of business owners are doing. They’re like, oh, this is so cool, I can get it to write an email. Great, but how can you make that profitable for you.””

Rizzan Delos Santos, owner of Riz Digital, works to make sure businesses are using AI in a way that is beneficial to their business.

While she emphasises that a human element is still vital, AI can be utilized in a way that saves business owners time. For example, she finds AI is a great way to make a first connection with potential clients. On LinkedIn she’s found it useful to have AI send a message to new followers, and based on their reply she can then reply herself to keep the conversation going.

“If they reply, then we talk, so you don’t lose the aspect of human touch, but the reaching out part, that’s being automated,” she said.

Even while using AI, Delos Santos still has a lot of work to do by making sure the AI doesn’t sound too robotic and making sure the automatic message is something she would actually write. “I feel like that’s one way that you can do the redundant task automatically, but never lose like that part of humanity.”

“Automation is exciting, but if your customers, your client base don’t welcome it, then you will lose customers,” she said, noting that for some companies AI simply won’t be beneficial to them.

Delos Santos uses Claude AI and has found it useful to make worksheets on Excel or Google Sheets. Previously she would have had to put different formulas into the spreadsheets to make them give her useful information. Now, using Claude, the AI automatically makes a spreadsheet with all the formulas already inserted based on what information Delos Santos is looking for.

“It’s not something that I would say is too fancy, but it’s good enough that it would work. Similarly, if you were planning a party, you can ask it just using simple language, ‘I want to create a worksheet for 30 people, and this is what I need and the budget I need,’ and then it will literally pull up all those things for you.”

She’s also used AI for social media. When she responds to a comment on a post, sometimes what she wants to say is very technical and can be hard for people to understand. Delos Santos will use AI to take what she’s written and put it into language everyone can understand.

Barrie has found in his work that people are beginning to understand these potentials of AI when they hear about examples that affect their business directly. Like Delos Santos, he said at the end of the day a human element is still a must for businesses.

“It’s great that you can use AI to create things or develop a document, but we always have to have a human in the loop at this point to read it, make sure it’s legit, and then release it. We always need to have that human approval.”