Should I incorporate AI into my business?

There is no doubt that the popularity of tools like Chat GPT and Copilot have left people wondering, “how do I use this to get a competitive edge?” or “is this going to replace my job?”.

The use of the term “AI” is extremely broad and encompasses many forms, such as large language models (or LLM’s, the heart of the tools (mentioned above) which seek to converse like a human, most used in chatbots) but this is different from, for example, computer vision which is used for facial recognition or object recognition and classification. These are both different (and more complex) than other forms of AI such as probability-based reactions used in single player video games (e.g. on easy mode an attack may have a 10% chance to be blocked, while in difficult mode it may have a 90% chance to be blocked).

With so many forms of artificial intelligence, each with different complexities and use-cases, it’s not a simple question to answer as to whether AI is “right” for your business.

QWERTY suggests defining the problem you’re trying to solve first, and implementing AI if AI is the best solution.

If you have a need to look at photos of animals and determine if it’s a dog or not, then you broadly have 2 options. A human can do this very well, and AI can be trained to do this easily as there are many free images of animals you can find online to train an AI model. Therefore, AI is a viable solution if you need to complete this process enough to warrant the time to implement over just having a human do it.

Alternatively, if you need to sift through documents to find various pieces of information, then you have additional challenges. Your information may be spread across many different file types and document structures. You may find that some documents have vastly different content (e.g. photocopies versus structured text). You may have multiple search criteria, where a document may have none, one, some, or all of what you’re trying to find. With so many variables, training a single AI model is challenging to say the least, and given that training models requires that a human has pre-determined the outcome, it’s not as viable or accurate implement AI for this scenario.

The above is why our File Content Extractor only uses AI for the optical character recognition component of the process, nothing else. This is pre-trained and irrelevant to the text you’re specifically trying to find.

In summary, QWERTY is certainly not against the use of AI (it’s a wonderful tool for software developers to streamline their process with writing generic, boilerplate code!). But, like how some businesses from around 2006 to 2016 releasing mobile apps “just because”, without a good reason to invest that time and money, we don’t recommend implementing AI “just because”, without determining it’s the right solution for a material problem.