How can I use AI to improve my business?

This question has come up many times recently. People are looking for a problem to solve with AI, because implementing AI is the buzz of our zeitgeist.

If you are trying to find a reason to implement AI into your business, you are essentially trying to find a problem to match a solution. Just as you don't buy a saw and then look for things to cut, you should have a specific need before seeking an AI solution.

All businesses have room to improve their processes, increase efficiency, reduce risk, and streamline financials. There are likely a myriad of incremental improvements which don't rely on AI, which are easy to implement and potentially more beneficial.

An example of this was when a business was looking for more efficient ways to run a manual check of a customer's history to ensure they were not double-paid. The check was time-consuming and yielded no results almost 100% of the time. So, instead of making the process for more efficient by training AI models to locate information, the process was abolished and it was risk-accepted that occasionally a customer would be double-paid (financially, it was cheaper to double-pay than it was to pay the staff to run the checks!).

Perhaps what we see today is a similar situation to the late 2000s, when businesses were finding reasons to release apps to phone app stores, even when there was no use-case to do so. I met a marketing manager who said to me, "We're releasing an app!" I asked what the app did. He said, "Well, what do you want it to do?" They had a plan to release an app to solve a problem, which they were yet to identify.

If you're asking how AI can improve your business, you might be asking the wrong question, or at least, putting the cart before the horse.