It got us thinking: at Swoop, we’ve grown rapidly over the past few years, and many of you, as SME founders, are looking to AI to help achieve similar ambitious growth. But as with any new technology, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype, or feel you’ve missed the boat.
The good news is that it’s far from too late. AI has the potential to transform your business, even if you’re only just thinking about getting started. At Swoop, for instance, we have embraced AI as a powerful data analysis tool. It can chew through vast datasets and even draft initial content. Our core belief, though, is that AI works best as a co-pilot, not a replacement. You’ll always see real people, real faces, and genuine voices in our content and when you call because the human touch is vital for authentic communication and building trust.
We’ve also heard from our customers about their own journey with AI, learned about the success stories and seen them through a few pitfalls. So here’s how your SME can harness AI’s potential for yourself.
Don’t just adopt AI, apply it to real problems
The biggest mistake SMEs make is going too fast and too wide by trying to apply AI to every problem or process they see. This is a sure way for the tech tail to wag the dog. Instead, start with your pain points, such as the repetitive tasks that slow down your team, inefficiencies that cost time and money or a gap in your customer service.
When you identify specific, measurable problems within your business operations, explore how AI tools (such as chatbots to advanced analytics platforms) can provide a solution. A small, early success is a better way to roll out AI than throwing AI where it’s not wanted and watch it fail to deliver. A focused approach ensures that your AI investment delivers tangible ROI, rather than being a costly experiment. Remember, even identifying these problems might require a small upfront investment, which is where having your funding options clear can be a major advantage.
Guard your growth: bake in cyber security
As you embrace AI and integrate more technology into your operations, your business becomes more digitally interconnected and, inevitably, more vulnerable. It’s not a question of if you’ll face a cyber attack, but when. We’ve seen large corporations like M&S, with immense resources, grapple with the significant costs of recovery from breaches. As an SME, your pockets simply aren’t that deep.
One of the big concerns businesses have is that their data may be used for modelling – that is, their sensitive or proprietary information could be fed into large language models or other AI systems, potentially compromising confidentiality, revealing competitive secrets, or even being reproduced in outputs that are publicly accessible or used by third parties. One thing SMEs should spend their money on is a paid account so that you can access the settings and keep your data private (make sure before you sign up that this is an option). A paid version means you can build custom GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) can be used for things like answering questions, writing articles and code, summarizing text, translating languages and creating chatbots.
Cyber insurance is a non-negotiable layer of protection. Ensure you have robust cyber insurance in place that covers data breaches, business interruption, and recovery costs. Compliance here is a critical component of your overall risk management strategy, protecting the very scaling you’re working so hard to achieve. Proactive planning for this, potentially including a specific budget line for such essential safeguards, is a wise use of your financial foresight.
Build your AI IQ (and share with your peers)
The AI landscape is evolving fast, but you don’t have to become an AI expert overnight. The best way to stay informed and make smart decisions is to actively seek out resources and engage with your network who will be facing similar challenges.
At Swoop, we believe it is essential for founders to find the bandwidth to attend webinars, read industry publications, and most importantly, talk to peers.
You’ll find all kinds of useful things out, whether that’s answering the question, “Should you be polite to your AI assistant?” (the perception is that using please and thank you in a prompt just means you’re taking more time to write it more clearly) or dedicating an intern to solve problems with AI to help socialize it to the rest of your business.
Other founders might have already found solutions or encountered pitfalls you can learn from (listening to customers has saved us from making a few mistakes). Networking at events like Elite Business Connect provides invaluable insights, partly because they ask the questions we didn’t know needed to be asked in the first place. Any new technology throws up “unknown unknowns”, but talking to peers can give you an understanding of how others approach AI, and what does (and doesn’t) work, which can save you significant time and resources.
AI, like the funding landscape, is in a constant state of evolution. Whether you plug into Swoop or connect with your peers, continuous learning will allow you to adapt your strategy and truly supercharge your scaling journey.
