AI Product Selection: A Practical Guide for Small Business
How to know what AI capabilities are available in your software
To start you can go to the website of the vendor of your product. All software providers are highlighting all of their AI capabilities as much as possible.
Silence isn’t necessarily a problem, since some platforms are being very secretive about the AI capabilities they are developing for competitive reasons, but you should be able to see that something big is coming. If you’re unsure, then talk to your account manager about the company’s plans.
Competitive Analysis
One Enterprise Management System that I work with has rebranded their product to put AI front and center. They are now an AI leader in their space simply because they announced their desire to be one. Their largest competitor is asking its customers what AI features they would like on social media and hasn’t yet expressed any vision for an AI-enabled future
In this era, if the product you use to run your business doesn’t have any big plans to integrate AI features, then you can take this as an announcement that the product is no longer being actively developed. Time to start looking for a new platform. Give me a call.
What will it do for us?
Good question. AI-features are so hit-and-miss that it can be easy to dismiss the entire suite of capabilities as risky or useless. All AI platforms urge human-review of all AI decisions. It can take time to dig in and it’s important to remember that the vast majority of AI features are version “1.0” of transformational collection of technologies. Ultimately, we’ll all be using these features all the time.
Conclusion
Expect big changes over the next year or two related to AI. We’ve all used ChatGPT by now but you can expect to see major changes in bookkeeping processes, marketing processes and customer relations in the coming releases of your software.
