How can SMEs effectively implement AI in their business? What are the steps to choosing the right AI solution for your company? The first day of the Elite Business Live 2024 saw hundreds of attendees in the audience as former Dragon Den Piers Linney took to the stage for the Digital Transformation keynote. Piers Linney, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Implement AI, spoke about the advantages of using artificial intelligence in your business – and why AI is here to stay.
Piers described AI as a ‘future’ in the way businesses will run. Companies will transform into AI-assisted organisations, using artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations on a small to grand scale. AI can support important business needs through automating business processes, gaining insight through data analysis and engaging with your customers. “AI is going to transform everything,” Piers explained. “Whether it’s the individual, augmenting yourself, or for your organisation business, or whether you’re a startup. It’s going to affect everything you do.”
The industrial revolution was a period of great change in Britain powered by manual labour and technological advances. As technology improves and the world evolves, there could be a time when organisations, businesses and governments move from human-led operations into a transformative AI approach. “We’re moving out of a human-first world into an AI-assisted era, and eventually we’re going to move into an AI-first world,” Piers added.
Artificial intelligence is here to say, and it is not going anywhere anytime soon, Piers explained. AI will not only transform the way we work, but also increase the productivity of the workforce through automation. Jobs that once required companies to employ hundreds of staff can potentially become automated tasks using AI, reducing hiring costs and increasing efficiency. “AI will generate the biggest productivity increase in history,” Piers explained. “We’re seeing lots more news about the safety of artificial intelligence, but what we’re going to see is more tangible evidence of AI changing, shaping our personal lives, organisations, governments and nation-states. If you want to be competitive in the future, you have to become an AI-assisted organisation.”
AI is going to fundamentally change every aspect of human society and business operations, Piers explained. AI is developing a lot faster than you think. With emerging technology, there are new and improved artificial intelligence platforms out in the market. Cognitive AI, also referred to as cognitive artificial intelligence, is software that tries to think and learn by imitating the way human brains work. These AI systems simulate human thought to augment human cognition.
“With AI you can be super innovative, but it can also be quite easily disrupted,” Piers said. “As an entrepreneur, how do you use artificial intelligence to make a difference? How do you create a competitive advantage? Like humans, they’re gathering our senses. At first, you had chats, then speech, now AI can hear, it will be able to touch quite soon. Our fingers can tell the difference between a house and a garden shed… Cognitive labour is going to be disrupting a lot faster.”
AI can even be used to build apps. With AI app development, you don’t need to spend as much money hiring developers to create your code from scratch, as some of the heavy lifting is done by AI. “If you are an entrepreneur in this day and age you’ve probably suffered from the pain of software projects, codes, or trying to create an app,” Piers said. “Now, that’s going away. Code is now the English language. Now you can talk to computers. It is quite technical to get it right. You can eventually now talk to an application, develop a code, develop a solution, give it feedback and tweak it, but it can just write code for you. That will create an explosion in opportunity for entrepreneurs.”
Is it necessary to use AI in your business now? If you decide against using artificial intelligence, you can risk playing ‘catch up’ in the future. AI is transforming the way businesses are run, through automating tasks, increasing productivity and efficiency. AI is expected to improve industries like healthcare, manufacturing and customer service, leading to higher-quality experiences for both workers and customers. “In an exponential world, it’s going to be very difficult to catch up,” Piers said. “You can wait 10 years for digital transformation. In AI, once your competition starts to get a competitive advantage, they’re making more margin, more profit, they’re more hyper-personalised, they’re adding more value to their customers. Once they start to take off, catching up years later will be nearly impossible. That’s why you need to start thinking about it today. This is applicable to almost every industry.”
