Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay. There’s no need to get worried that you’re being left behind, but it definitely will give your business an advantage over your competitors if you use available AI tools well.
But where to start? How to navigate the countless AI applications, with new ones being published daily? And how to find the AI use cases that really drive your business and are in line with your strategy?
This is where an AI consultant can help. In this article, read
- What AI consulting is
- What AI consultants do
- What AI use cases for small business are out there
- How to identify Ai use cases for your business
Let’s dive in.
What is AI consulting
AI consulting is a service that helps you to develop an AI strategy, define use cases, select tools and ultimately implement.
Ai consulting works like classical management consulting. The goal is to create a lasting impact on your business, ultimately deeply embedding Ai into your operations and offering structure.
Ai consulting exists as the evergrowing landscape of AI tools and their technical complexity becomes increasingly hard to navigate.
At the same time, the competitive need to use AI is emerging. Innovative players in your industry are already harnessing the power of AI for their business.
An AI consultant will help you do the same.
What do AI consultants do
While AI consultants might follow different approaches, here’s what working with an AI consultant will look like:
Analysis
Ai consultants starts with analysis. In simple terms, this means analyzing your business for potential AI use cases.
Activities will include:
- Analyzing your offering structure
- Analyzing your processes, value chain
- Analyzing your and your team’s time spent
The goal is to identify areas that could benefit from using artificial intelligence (for different types of use cases, see below).
Potential use cases will be prioritized based on two dimensions:
- How much value AI can add to the specific area of your business
- How feasible an implementation will be from a technical, financial and workflow perspective
Tool shortlist and selection
As a next step, AI consultants will work with you to select Ai tools to address the highest priority use cases.
There’s a countless number of AI tools available, and hundreds being added weekly. It requires a good industry overview to identify the tools that add value to your business.
Once potential tools have been identified, Ai consultants will shortlist tools based on the your individual success criteria.
This enables you to select the right tool for you, ensuring you find a tool that supports your use case and creates value for you and/or your clients.
The result of this tool selection process in combination with the analysis is an Ai roadmap for your business.
Implementation
Ai consultants will help to implement selected Ai tools into your workflow.
Implementing AI tools includes the following activities
- Technical setup
- Integration with existing tools
- Prompt engineering or trigger setup
- Workflow adjustments to adjust your processes to the new AI tool
- Training your team on the new tool
- Helping you rephrase your offering or communicate an enhanced offering to clients
Continuous improvement and learning
The beauty about AI tools is that they are dynamic. Most tools get better over time, as they learn from the throughput they process.
In addition, an Ai consultant will help you constantly monitor results and improve technical setup, prompts and triggers as well as workflows feeding into the AI tool.
This will ensure that your AI journey makes you successful, instead of just following the hype.
What are AI use cases for small business
In general, there are three fundamental use cases for AI applications:
Personal productivity
The first fundamental use case is enhancing personal productivity. Your productivity as the founder or CEO of your business directly translates into your business’ productivity.
Examples for personal productivity use cases are:
- Meeting notes and task processing: AI can help you take meeting notes and derive tasks from it.
- Scheduling: AI can help you optimize your calendar planning, by scheduling your days for you based on what’s important, not on what’s most urgent
Efficiency – Doing things in a better way
Efficiency use cases for Ai in small business are characterized by reducing the time or resources necessary to deliver your service.
The output or value for your client stays mostly the same, but you’re able to deliver it in less time with lower cost.
Examples for efficiency use cases are:
- Creating content, e.g. for your ecommerce listings, with AI
- Using AI to analyze larger amounts of data or text
- Using AI to craft documents
- Using AI to automatically categorize incoming documents, like invoices
Efficacy – Doing better things
Efficacy use cases are characterized by expanding and enhancing what you do. This will often revolve around additional offering components, improved deliverables or an expanded service offering.
There are many industries where the first fully AI driven delivery models have emerged.
While the most fun and interesting use cases for many, efficacy use cases are also the most difficult. You need to consider and balance quality of AI generated results with your positioning in the market and your customer expectations.
Examples for efficacy use cases:
- Adding a new derivative content format to blog posts you write, like Ai generated LinkedIn posts
- Adding AI-based market research to your offering as a consultant
How to identify AI uses cases in my business
There are two fundamental approaches to identifying AI use cases in your business.
Analysis
Similar to what we described above, the best way to identify AI use cases in your business is the flow described above.
If you don’t want to work with an AI consultant, here are some simple questions to guide your use case identification:
- What things am I spending a lot of time on, and they’re not adding a lot of value?
- Where are we creating content or assets that are not critical to perceived quality by our clients?
- Where are we manually analyzing a lot of data, to process, categorize, or transform it in a repeatable way?
- Are we tackling unique problems where finding a framework to address them is a time-consuming one-time effort?
Answering these questions will likely lead you to some promising AI use cases.
If you find you’re looking for some help on your AI journey, reach out to us.