AI, it has come hard and fast into our lives, we weren’t asked, consulted or for that matter given a choice. From now on decisions you make, what you watch, what you read and what you listen to will all be decided or even created by some AI bot. Even this article could well be some AI pumping out junk 😉 …….. It isn’t this week, but perhaps it should be.
This lack of choice and blanket accepting of AI in our lives, is ultimately going to feed some problems, that every business in every industry is now facing. Because I guarantee there is a business in your industry, next door that has over adopted AI and is running 10 times more efficient than yourself and your peers. I understand and hear it everyday, “their high reliance on AI, must deteriorate their overall service” and I agree. But how often is any business in Sydney providing perfect service. I know we all strive for it, but in reality its just an ambition. More importantly with the lack of trained staff, high wages and a bursting population, perfection to many of your clients is someone turning up and being able to do the job.
Its hard enough to get someone to come out quote and complete a job, no ones looking for perfection.
What AI is doing extremely well right now is giving back time, and lots of it. Yes you could probably go and sack half your staff and many organisations have, but a better solution is to retain the staff and have them building your business in more constructive ways.
The age old saying “Time is Precious” has never been truer. Now I can give you and your employees back so much time you will be bored. Let me give your time back so you can focus on growing your business in your direction tomorrow.
Last week we saw the tech markets and tech indexes, world wide plummet. This was on the realisation of just how powerful and interrupting this AI technology is going to be to what we know and how we achieve it. The crash centred around the devaluing of every piece of software we use after Anthropic release new automation capabilities and plugins for its Claude AI (exposed via APIs) that could handle complex end‑to‑end workflows, targeted to the legal, compliance, sales, and data analysis markets, of which are traditionally dominated by expensive SaaS (Software as a service) or cloud based products.
The crash is a little premature, as although large organisations have snapped up the top developers and formed programming teams to create their own software. The rest of the world will still need some industry standard platforms to run their organisations from. Platforms that keep their software updated, secure and compliant with laws and regulations. Much of this extra governance and responsibility is well outside the scope or desire of most Australian companies. So although AI has made coding your own business applications accessible to your 10 year old, implementing that software and relying on it everyday to run your business is not in my crystal ball.
So what should you be doing with AI ?
Getting back time, time is precious to us both personally and at business. AI can automate every one of those jobs in your workplace that consumes your time. Whether it be listening to someone’s brief, filling out any type of paperwork, processing forms or paperwork, answering calls, answering question or just sorting and processing data AI can do all this in seconds.
The hardest part is you reaching out to me and providing a task to automate. Many don’t release how many tasks we can hand over to AI TODAY.
Microsoft Co-pilot – A great introduction to AI
Many of our clients have already subscribed to the Microsoft 365 platform. This platform is Microsoft’s cloud based office productivity suite. One of the benefits of this platform is the cloud based SharePoint data repository. Having all of a companies data and applications in one place brings about true collaboration, an idea Microsoft has been trying to achieve for decades.
What Microsoft didn’t envisage is the rapid rise in AI chat bots and the serendipity of Microsoft clients already having all their company data conveniently stored on central storage on the cloud all in one place. This gives Microsoft’s Co-Pilot a genuine head start in providing simple , yet extremely effective AI to all users.
Microsoft’s Co-Pilot hasn’t really been given a description yt, other than a chat bot. However in reality it is much more than a chat bot, as you don’t need to need it like the others. What many users don’t understand is the Microsoft Co-pilot chatbot has complete access to your Emails, documents, databases, ERP, Systems, financials and anything else Microsofty or stored there.
Then there is the real killer, many don’t even realise exists, its called “Windows Recal“. Whereby Microsoft is “taking automatic snapshots of your screen every time content changes”
So with all this information at hand, Co-pilot can do anything you or your job requires in seconds.
- Summarise your Emails
- Sort your documents
- Create talking points for a client meeting
- Summarise a teams meeting
- Tell me all about a client, staff member, company.
- Comment and fix an error on the screen.
The list is endless, and since it also has access to every other piece of data on the internet s well as all your private data, we can extrapolate these jobs outside of the office.
- Are the rents on all my investment properties in line with the market ?
- Are all our insurances up to date, priced competitively and do we have sufficient cover for our business.
- Did we pay to much for those shares, businesses or hardware.
- How many people are going to read this article if I post it to our website, LinkedIn and Facebook ?
Of course we are only in year 1 of mainstream AI usage, so we cant rely 100% on the answers that it may give us. However these question can transpose a comprehensive answer that I guarantee will bring information to light that you hadn’t thought of, prepare you to finalise and save you hours and hours of pointless work.
Ai for Form Processing
Forms !… What happened to a paperless society ?
Everyone has forms, be it paper or electronic they all need to be processed and entered, some being doubled or even triple entered. AI software can parse forms in seconds. It really doesn’t matter if they are actual forms, 500 page documents, images or screen images. Any media with some text on it, AI has a parser than can parse the entire document in seconds and do anything with the resulting data. And we are not just talking automating the storing of the data afterwards, typically we will take the data and then parse it through another AI API to produce rich data for your application, processes or acceptance. A complete turn key system for a process that has been steeling valuable time from yourself and your staff forever.
Ai for Voice Processing
Just like documents and forms above, we have numerous AI agents we can program into any of your systems to convert voice into text or data and/to text to voice. The medical industry was a quick adopter to this system with Heidi in Australia taking of and providing Australian medical specialist and doctors fast automated transcriptions of there voce recordings.
Of course In Australia automated voice systems or IVR’s on our industries help desks and call centres are often (and rightly so) meet with user frustration, swearing and a hot headed customer. Industry knows how they frustrate us, or they would constantly remind us whilst on hold to “treat there staff with respect when we finally get through” as it is our fault. AI agents, have the ability to solve both these problems, quickly and easily, freeing customer service staff for bespoke issues and real customer service. That’s if they don’t make half of them redundant, they wouldn’t would they ?
AI engines can take voice calls and transpose the in seconds, even if both ends are human. This gives companies the benefit to –
- Summarise voice meeting and phone calls and have summaries sent to emails
- Have tickets automatically created and lodged from voice calls
- Generate summaries and follow up project management points and meeting from voice calls
- Critic voice calls from all staff to ensure the companies culture is being expressed on calls.
AI voice processing in hospitallity
Some of the other beneficiaries of this system is the hospitality sector. Many businesses in the hospitality industry spend vast amounts of time on the phone taking repetitive orders. Currently we have Hungry Jacks in Australia piloting AI for its drive through orders. Several pizza chains are now solely using AI to answer the phone calls and take the order over the phone.
AI for quick precise image creation
One of the more novel uses for modern AI engines is the creating of both images and videos. This has coursed a great deal of news, speculation and drama over the past year in social media circles. But outside of pranks, clicks and sensationalism, the quick and accurate creation of images AI brings to the desktop can be a complete time saver. I’m no graphics designer, yet I need to create images for ever one of our posts. Before AI this task would see me trolling through pixel bay for some free image that some how represent the article and if that didn’t work, I would then pay a few dollars in royalties, to some struggling photographer at shutter stock. The whole process taking over an hour per image and that’s before resizing and making it “web ready”. Now I just cut the above paragraph and let AI create me an image – oh and then just for fun, tell it to “replace the image on the right screen with a PIP branded hot air balloon carrying a super car”…. Why Not ?
