What AI can do
- Write, and illustrate!, an original children's bedtime story...in 3 minutes (Twitter Link)
- Diagnose breast cancer that doctors missed
- Watch as you share your screen, and talk to you about it
- Power humanoid robots' walking, like Tesla's Optimus
AI's capabilities are advancing rapidly - from crafting bedtime stories to powering robots. But for UK SMEs, the real question is: how can AI help your business save time, cut costs, and grow faster?
UK SMEs and AI - The broad impact
AI and LLMs stand to be the biggest accelerator and disruptor of business since the internet; affecting every facet of work and every employee because they work at the base functions of every role - reading, writing & understanding. Including AI with robotics adds a very real physical dimension to its impact.
The service industries account for over 80% of the UK's GDP. I would argue that this makes the UK, and other first-world and heavily-digitised economies, more open to the effects of AI & LLMs as much of these roles are done through reading, writing, understanding and communicating - all of which AI can improve & accelerate.
Game theory and growingly-global competition for revenue, skills & attention mean that companies that leverage disruptive technologies like AI stand to gain the most, and companies that don't...well ask Kodak, Blockbuster, Yahoo!, Nokia, Blackberry and countless smaller businesses. This shouldn't be seen as threatening; things always move forward and seeing what can be done with new technology tends to be net-positive,
How AI can save time & money and improve work in UK SMEs
AI and LLMs can be incredibly useful without any customisation or being connected to your other services and apps. Some of the most popular, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, allow you to ask questions and get answers in seconds, browse the web for answers and summarise massive documents.
I'll be doing another blog post, where I give a massive list of the specific tasks within roles like Business Owner, Marketer and Secretary that LLMs can help with, but see the below for some more general examples.
- Writing & Editing: Generative AI like ChatGPT & Claude allows people to understand & produce text faster than ever. Use it to draft emails & proposals (and even send them, if you choose), create social media & marketing content, update templates, adjust tone & rephrase entire paragraphs...in seconds
- Research & Analysis: Today's AIs can work on over 100 pages of text, including PDFs, allowing them to do deep research; comparing information & presenting useful summaries, faster than a person. Some can access the Internet (with linked sources) to fetch the most recent information. They're also great for summarising meetings & actions
- Improve Decisons & Creativity: AI helps assess scenarios, weigh pros and cons, and provide inspiration for problem-solving and strategic planning. Just text it like you would a consultant.
Automate time-sucks: Every employee can get their own custom AI ('GPT') to help them do more, faster & easier. Additionally, your company can get its own AI, capable of referring to your own company documents & answering employees' questions like "What's the annual leave policy?", even at 5am
How to get started
There are currently over 10 providers of consumer AI solutions, each with its own pros and cons (this will be another deep-dive blog post). It's a very fast moving space and getting the wrong system can make it difficult for staff to see the benefits of an AI implementation. As a business or function owner you can:
- Hope your teams start using it by themselves, correctly (and many are already using it, potentially without the business' knowledge, which brings its own dangers)
- Ask your IT team to do it, amongst the rest of their tasks, delaying the benefits of getting started with AI
- Get Catalyst AI UK to handle it all, from understanding what your staff & business need, literally doing the full setup for each of your employees (in-office or remote) & training - all for a flat fee per employee
