(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
Ask any owner of a small or midsized company about AI and they’ll tell you they’re “interested.” But are they really using it? No, not yet. There’s still a lot of distrust and doubt about AI’s capabilities, reliability and security. In the meantime, most larger corporations have brushed those concerns aside and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing their own AI applications, most without success.
All the experts tell us that AI will change everything in our lives and in our businesses. But it’s still early days. However, if you’re looking to invest in AI this coming year there are three types of applications that you can use in your business and be comfortable that they actually work.
Virtual Assistant AI
I recently wrote about a company called Slang.AI that provides a voice enabled virtual host that answers the phone for a restaurant and makes table bookings. It works. Voice technology works. Most of us have had a decent experience when calling larger corporations, hotels, airlines, and telecommunications firms for customer service and getting patched through to a bot. The technology is advanced enough to truly understand a caller and be able to act on their needs.
To that end, you should look at RingCentral, ConnexAI, Smith.AI and JustCall. All of these platforms will provide a virtual assistant to replace your receptionist. The voices used by these platforms are very human but — like all AI bots — can be easily outed as a bot. No matter. My smartest clients are configuring these virtual receptionists to immediately identify themselves as virtual receptionists and then giving the caller the option to speak to a human. For rudimentary tasks — transferring to a voice mail, taking a message, answering simple questions — these virtual assistants can do the job.
My clients who are using them say there’s a growing number of callers who prefer to ask a question and get a quick response from a virtual assistant over a human. Others prefer a human and that’s OK too. But don’t fire your receptionist. These assistants take away work from an office worker that can be used for more productive tasks.
AI: Website Chat
CRM platforms like Salesforce, Zoho, Fresh Desk and a number of other stand-alone companies offer website chat products can not-so-easily be deployed on your site to answer visitor’s questions and then perform tasks.
I say “not-so-easy” because I’ve learned from my clients who do this that it takes a bit of time to implement these things. The setup and configuration is not so hard. But if you’re going to use the AI chat to answer questions, you’ll have to provide it with the information it needs. You’ll need to sit down with your team and come up with a list of common issues and answers. You’ll need figure out the methodology to manage a chat conversation as one question oftentimes begets another question. You’ll have to determine a workflow and then flowchart the conversation. You’ll have to decide if you want to use agents to automatically send out information or notify people internally. These are not technology obstacles. These are workflow challenges that need to be thought about well in advance.
The risk of cutting corners is high. If visitors get turned off by your website chat application you could lose sales or annoy customers. If the right data isn’t gathered then your customer service or sales people may be providing incorrect information or simply wasting their time.
Having said that, if you’re willing to put in the work, these website chat tools that use AI to process requests are pretty good and getting better. They’re reliable to deploy and can provide significant ROI by allowing the people handling a lot of this work to handle more work, or do other work.
AI: Assistants
Obviously we’re familiar with these: Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and there are many others. Most of my clients have dabbled with these platforms, asking them to help create emails or write a document or do some research. None of them fully trust these platforms because they’re wrong — oh, sorry, the “hallucinate” — ten to twenty percent of the time. And they’re right, this is an issue needing to be addressed if we want to truly consider these platforms credible. But they’re getting better. And new offerings — like ChatGPT Pro’s “Deep Research” can provide better and more reliable responses if the user is willing to wait a little longer so that the AI Assistant can think.
However, this is the year that business owners and managers need to choose at least one AI Assistant, pay for the better version and lean into it heavily.
By leaning in, I first mean truly learning and then using all of the capabilities. For example, ChatGPT can easily be connected to a company’s Dropbox, SharePoint, Outlook, Gmail, Slack and other business systems. Which means that prompts can be done using a company’s data for more relevant and useful responses. In addition, ChatGPT now has agents which can be launched to perform agentic browsing tasks like filling out forms, requesting supplier or customer updates and sending email notifications’ when prices change or new regulations in an industry are issued.
OpenAI also has an enormous GPT library of apps that can be very specific to an industry, well and above what ChatGPT offers out of the box. Its image and video creation — while far from perfect — is getting much better. The other AI Assistants have similar offerings.
I know few clients that are aware of these functions. And yet by learning them — yes even paying a consultant for training — they can be leaning into these AI Assistants and getting much more value from them. They can spread the usage around the company. They can preach that not a single document, proposal, quote, bid, contract or other correspondence leaves the company without first getting input from the company’s AI Assistant. They can better use their AI Assistant to not only research prior activities but create policies, memos and contract that would then be reviewed by their attorneys or others.
AI: Becoming Reality
All of these three AI applications are officially ready for commercial prime time. I wish I could say the same about so many others, but I can’t…yet. In the meantime, if you run a business or manage a department or division I can officially confirm that these applications work and using them will significantly help productivity.
