Integrating AI in the Workplace ~Revolutionize Your Business

AI: Supercharging Your Business Potential 

Warning: AI is not just a trend, it's a total disruptor! It's everywhere and the hottest topic in town. It's here to stay and businesses not embracing it are going to be left behind. 

Now, if the extent of your AI knowledge stops at ChatGPT, Midjourney, Julius, Sybill, or Notion, I'll provide some back-story.  Because, while you furrow your brow and copy that last sentence, your competition is shifting into high gear with AI, impressing more clients, streamlining their operations, boosting their productivity, and raking in the rewards. Are you AI ready? 

First, an AI Crash Course 

This is a huge topic, so I’ll try to keep it lay and light. If you want more insights, you know where to find me. As for all you techie AI professionals and LLM programmers out there (firstly, hats off to you), you have time to get another coffee and maybe a bit of sunshine.
Vitamin D is very good for you!

There are two main categories of AI for this discussion. One is Machine Learning (ML) and the other, newer, is generative AI (GenAI). There are other examples like computer vision, robotics, etc., but we’re not going to go down those paths right now.

Machine learning systems learn from input and improve task performance without being explicitly programmed, employing algorithms to identify patterns and make predictions or decisions based on information.  Still with me ...? Google search, Amazon suggestions, Netflix recommendations, targeted ads, and TikTok curating your feed through engagement are all good examples. You input an interest, a keyword, a selection, and the system algorithm ‘learns,’ provides matches, and classifies it. It’s not formulating, however, it’s mimicking and matching.

GenAI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, Claude, GitHub Copilot, and Stable Diffusion are advanced models that can create new content such as text, images, and code. These tools use deep learning techniques that involve artificial neural networks and natural language processing intelligence to generate human-like output, making them useful for endless and varied applications and customer service interactions. 

These LLMs appear creative, but they are only simulating creativity based on patterns in their training data. (Shhh, it's always about the data.) They pull it off quite effectively too, especially if you are a prompting ninja. But they are not always accurate and can hallucinate—that’s AI lingo for making crap up and making it sound legit! That’s why AI should not be left to its own devices. It’s like a genius teenager that can sometimes go off the rails, as such it needs to be monitored and managed ... closely.

Let’s move on with a note about robotic process automation (RPA), although not a branch of AI, it does automate repetitive, rule-based tasks without any learning or decision-making. While RPA can work alongside AI for more complex processes, it just follows set rules and automates tasks, rather than using intelligent systems to perform, but it's still beneficial in workplace processes as long as you have the resources to setup all the rules.

Understanding how AI can help

AI will help you streamline your workflows, analyze, summarize, code, fact-check, and automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Across industries, it can manage inventory, enhance fraud detection, assist with diagnostics, and do investment analysis. Utilizing AI will free-up employee time, so they can focus on strategic activities, business operations, and improving services. What business owner or director doesn’t want to kick productivity in the ass? Well, AI can help businesses achieve way more with way less.

If you’ve got the data …

Assuming you are inputting business information into some sort of database--I hope you are--you can save your data staff from endless hours of compiling, analysing, cleansing, error correcting, coding, and using project management tools to do their work. Instead, feeding data, discreetly and very confidentially, through private AI aggregators can provide actionable insights in seconds! Want trend analysis, okay! Predictive analytics, okay! Sales volumes, okay! KPIs, okay! Data audits, okay! 

Yes, to all of it! In seconds! You need the right AI, though, with budget considerations and knowledge of how to load and prompt—yes, it is an art. AI can digest even the largest volumes of data and help businesses just like yours make data-driven decisions to enhance productivity and smash issues.

AI systems can analyze data patterns and predict trends, helping your business anticipate market changes, optimize pricing strategies, and improve customer and employee experiences. Advanced AI analytics tools can identify potential improvement and growth opportunities that may be eluding you. It can identify what's trending, and identify gaps, hot spots, and potential risks. Overall, AI enables a proactive and efficient approach to data insights and outputs.

How else can AI help?

Let’s get those SLAs and targets up! AI enhances customer experiences by expediting and personalizing interactions. It can analyze, respond, write, summarize, query, flag, aggregate, report, and monitor in microseconds, and, wow, can they chat! There are AI technologies so conversational that it’s difficult to separate them from a human conversation. When a customer makes contact, your AI has already analyzed the querent’s bio, historical transactions, account details, etc. and all in milliseconds before anyone says 'hello.'  It can tailor solutions, next steps, and initiate the necessary workflows as needed. Scary, I know!

If sales are your focus, AI can assemble desired marketing targets based on your business data, products and services in real-time, heck, it can assemble the entire campaign and apply best industry practice if that's what charges your battery!

Phew! Finally, the HR stuff! 

There are numerous AI applications for HR. I think I’ve blogged most of them already. I encourage you to have a gander … seriously, go look! AI in HR can automate and manage routine processes, provide progress reports (with suggestions), identify skill gaps, write your job descriptions/postings, do job market analysis, automate and aggregate the job classification process, digest people data, analyze it and make recommendations. It can organize and align business planning, streamline processes, lower service costs, improve data governance, and shhh, it can keep it all secret too!

AI can interact with your employees, predict how they are doing, working, and feeling, and provide avenues for improvement, engagement, training, and assistance. Hello? Better talent management = higher moral, improved well-being, and a more motivated workforce!

AI tools can screen resumes, facilitate performance management activities, create any HR template, policy template, or form you desire. There's more! How about drafting interview questions, scoring matrices, onboarding ‘to dos,’ and schedule and remind you about them. AI can manage team tasks, monitor progress and performance, recommend workforce plans based on your data. Essentially, this helpful little bit of tech is there to eliminate all the repetitive time-consuming tasks so your HR people and org supporters can support your people and org.

AI Integration Playbook 

So, you’re probably thinking, ‘This is all super helpful, but how the heck do I roll out the red carpet for AI and greet it like Elon would?’ Easy! You stop thinking about it as a glitchy robot overlord out to steal your job and, instead, embrace it as the new business superstar assistant it is, and then watch your efficiency skyrocket! The moment you make the change from, ‘What is all this AI hype?’ to ‘How can I harness this digital disrupter?’ is when the magic happens, my friend. So, what’s the plan to integrate it? Well, you contact Cohesion HR, of course! I know, you’re shy, I get it. So, I’m going to outline a few of the steps for you. There are more, but we can discuss those later.  

1.  You need an understanding of AI and what it can do
What's out there? Learn some background on business AI. What potential does it have for your business. Familiarize yourself with the applications and concepts. Conduct some research and reference AI use cases in your industry.

2.  Business Analysis: what are the business needs?
Every business has its pain points and processes that can be improved. Identify them and determine if AI will add value and then prioritize based on feasibility, impact, relative cost, and potential ROI. Tip: consider tasks that are repetitive, data-intensive, time-consuming, customer-serving, or require rapid decision-making.

3.  What are the AI objectives?
What are the outcomes you want for your business? Identify them, all of them. Ensure that they are specific, align with your business strategy, and can be measured.

4.  What solutions are a good fit?
Select the AI tools, platforms, or providers that align with your business objectives and strategies. Should be a no-brainer, right? Evaluate the vendors serving similar industries. What are their technologies and service offerings? Can they share some insights? Demo, demo, demo, score and assess, demo again (lather, rinse, repeat), right down to security, storage, and services. Oh, and have a long list of question ready!

5.  Is your organization ready?
This is important. Do you have the data, IT infrastructure, and capacity to support AI integration? If not, what do you need? Are external providers a viable solution? Also, it's critical to analyze your workforce and cultural readiness because it's gonna change the way your people work! 

There's more ...

What is the AI fluency level in your organization? You likely need some Cohesion HR consulting, along with some staff AI-adoption training (yep, throwing that in ;) Your staff needs to know how this will benefit them, so involve them! Make them part of the change you want to see!

6.  AI strategy, development, and planning
Draft a project outline, a plan, a roadmap. Include timelines, milestones, risks, constraints, interdependencies, testing requirements, communication needs, budget, resources, data prep, securities, and management. Ahh, take a breath, Pam!! And ... release ...

7.  Build and work with expertise
You will need to build internal capabilities and train-up your workplace experts. It's a good idea to seek external expertise to assist with this initiative. Cohesion HR can help identify the skill gaps and what the 'big ticket' training needs will be. Partnering with providers and consultants can ease the change process, alleviate burdens from falling on your internal management, and ensure successful integration, knowledge transfer, and adoption.

8. Start with a pilot project
It’s best practice to pilot. Launching on a smaller scale lowers the risk and will allow for closer observation using real scenarios.  It will provide an opportunity to identify potential issues, refine processes, garner feedback, and validate the concept and data before a full-scale launch.

9.  Full implementation, integration and adoption
Good to go? Great! Apply the lessons learned from the pilot to the broader implementation. Now that AI is integrated with existing systems and workflows, ensure your documentation, policies, and training materials are centralized, easy to locate, and reviewed regularly for relevancy and accuracy.

10.  Monitor, evaluate, improve, scale     
Get feedback. Track performance. Adjust and optimize as needed. Where else can you potentially expand? AI technologies are ever changing so assessing what will and won’t work for your organization is a continuous process. Are there new opportunities? Yes? See step one.

Incredibly Important Things to Remember

One: Data privacy, policies, and governance
Two: Ethical concerns surrounding AI          
Three: Compliancy                                       
Four: Fairness and transparency                   
Five: Training and buy-In

Take away

AI is not overlookable. It is something your business will need to succeed, innovate, and stay ahead of the competition. It is not an upgrade, it's a revolution. Integrating AI into your workplace bit by bit will provide significant improvements to your bottom line. So, let’s get you ahead of the curve and crushing the status quo! The extended hand may be virtual, or 3D mesh, but it’s still a hand. Let’s talk.                                     
Cohesion HR – Connecting the dots!