It’s tough being the middle child: you miss out on the leniency given to the youngest but you don’t get the same freedoms as the oldest child. All the attention is focused away from you.
Midsize companies are much the same: you no longer have the extreme flexibility of a small business but you don’t yet have the financial freedoms of a large business. Your staff and budget are still small, so you need to stay flexible and resourceful to achieve some big goals.
I’ve talked in this space before about this conundrum and how productivity and efficiency are key to maximizing your staff and budget. If you’ve focused on productivity for more than five minutes, you’ve probably explored the idea of automating workflows and thought about using generative AI to help. Freeing your staff to work on higher-cognitive and creative tasks not only reduces but it can make for happier employees.
But there’s more generative AI can do for your middle child.
You can use it to improve your customer service. If you’re not already using a chatbot on your site to start customer service conversations, now is the time—before it becomes so ubiquitous that your company looks behind the times without one. Customer-service chatbots can help resolve some issues without any human intervention, easing the volume of inquiries to customer service agents. That will free them to give more attention and creativity to solving more complex problems.
You can also supercharge your email customization. Go beyond creating list segments and inserting a first name in the subject line. Let an AI tool like rasa.io analyze your email marketing data and create customized emails by individual recipient.
And you can make more informed decisions throughout your company with data analysis provided by generative AI. Let AI analyze inventory levels, shipping logistics, and supplier performance to help you improve your supply chain processes. Maybe feed it sales data and market trends to help identify growth opportunities or improved pricing strategies. The better the analysis, the better decisions you can make for any area of your business.
But how do you get started?
Create an AI Strategy
It’s likely that individual staffers are already trying out generative AI in their work, testing what’s possible and (hopefully) evaluating the results. That’s good! AI is here to stay and we all need to build our skills to use it well.
But for generative AI to have a strong, positive impact on the whole company, you need a strategic, organization-wide approach to it. Senior leaders need to get together and explore the following questions:
· How will you use AI? What areas of your business would benefit from it? Are there areas that need to be free of AI to protect privacy or intellectual property rights?
· Within a department or area, what kind of tasks would be useful to automate?
· Where would AI data analysis help your company grow or improve?
· What goals will you have with AI usage? What will success look like?
· How will you integrate AI into your current tech environment?
· How will you train employees to use AI?
· How else will you support your employees in AI use?
· How will you know if your investment has paid off?
With a strategy in place, you can start exploring all the generative AI tools available based on your needs and goals. You can start with “From Theory to Practice: Your AI Prompt Cheat Sheet and Tools Roundup” in our Resource Library for sample use cases. You can also check out The AI Journal for new tools, as well as prompt ideas.
In general, you want to skip the free versions of AI tools, which are generally not as powerful as paid tools and can produce uneven results when used as scale. When your goal is to advance the whole company, you want the best results possible.
You’re often trading your privacy for free use, as well. Be sure to read the fine print before putting any sensitive information into an AI tool. Key questions to ask include:
· Does the company train its AI on your materials?
· Can you opt out if it does?
· Do you trust it to opt you out if you choose that option?
Would you give your biggest competitor access to your intellectual property or your customers’ private information? By using an AI tool that trains on that data, you may be doing just that. Make sure you protect yourself
You have two options when it comes to paying for generative AI. The more obvious choice is a paid team or enterprise subscription, like Claude Team or ChatGPT Team. A paid subscription should give you more features, a better data model, more privacy options, and more customization opportunities.
The other option is to work with an expert to create custom algorithms and models to use in your business, particularly if you have a specific business problem that off-the-shelf tools can’t solve. You can partner with the likes of Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, of course. Or you can check out firms that offer more targeted support, such as BonsAI Labs or Chalice Custom Algorithms.
Alternatively you can hire your own data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI architects to build what you need in-house. Or try some combination of free, paid, and custom. Do what works best for your situation.
Integrate AI Into Your Environment
Whichever path you take, work with your IT team to ensure that the tools you choose integrate with your current IT environment. Off-the-shelf solutions should be set up to protect your company’s privacy. Sometimes it’s just a click of a button to ensure your data is not stored by the tool. Take advantage of any features that will better customize results, such as training the tool on your brand voice. In particular, Claude, Jasper AI, and Copy.ai are known for their ability to learn your brand.
You’ll want to follow IT’s lead on how to prepare to integrate AI into your environment, but at minimum plan for software updates and data cleanup.
After rollout, be sure to keep your new tools up to date. Advances are happening quickly, and you could miss out on great new features or important bug fixes. Make it someone’s job to stay on top of update news, advances in using AI, and legal implications.
Once your new tools are up and running, establish guidelines for how to use them in your workflows. Standardizing processes will help staff adapt to new ways of doing things and multiple the results you can achieve.
Make it clear from the start that employees are expected to review all AI results for accuracy and relevance. There’s so much that can go wrong: We’re fallible with our prompts, the data the AI trained on is human created and is fallible and biased, and the AI itself is fallible. Never let AI create something unmonitored.
Foster an AI Culture
While some folks are excited about the possibilities AI can offer, many more are unsure about it all. That’s understandable when you consider how little humans like change and how much change AI is bringing.
Start building trust by sharing your vision for how AI will support your staff. Emphasize the value your staff has to your company and how AI will free them to do the higher-cognitive, creative work that no machine can do.
Offer training to everyone who will work with the new tools and anyone else who wants to learn. Take advantage of any training that accompanies your new tools and seek out training and information that focuses on your specific uses of AI. The basics of using generative AI chatbots seem to be everywhere and are often free. Check out “OND: AI Basics in Digital Marketing for your Small Business” here in the Resource Library and this ZDNET collection of free AI courses for some options.
There are plenty of courses right now that will charge you hundreds of dollars to learn the basics of generative AI and prompts. You can do better. When paying for courses, look for ones that are specialized to your situation or that go deeper than the basics. New courses are launching almost as quickly as new tools are. Try proven sources, like Coursera, DataCamp, and AWS Training and Certification. For custom tools, work with your provider or in-house team to provide training for all users.
PLUS! Coming soon exclusively for Lenovo Pro members: Lenovo Pro will be launching and AI PCs for Business online course on Lenovo Pro Community this Fall! Stay tuned for updates and signup information!
Encourage your employees to share their experiences—and not just the successful experiments. Knowing what doesn’t work saves someone else from the same failures. Lead by example, sharing your own successes and failures, and you’ll find your employees more willing to share in kind.
Creating a prompt library accessible to anyone will also help with adoption. Encourage employees to share their prompts and how they used the AI’s responses. Have a community space where people can ask for ideas on how to use the new tools or for help with their prompts. Not only will it build skills faster but it will increase team spirit.
Leverage Your Needs and Grow
The wild ride of AI has barely begun. We all have to learn how to integrate AI tools into our businesses. Midsize companies are more motivated than most because of the unique pressures they face. Use that pressure to your advantage, and you’ll leapfrog over your competition and become the large company you dream of becoming.
Erin Brenner is the owner of Right Touch Editing, a boutique editorial agency that specializes in helping small and midsize businesses to be more engaging with their audiences, more persuasive in their marketing, and clearer and more precise in their communications.
Erin is also the author of The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors: How to Take Care of Your Business, Your Clients, and Yourself from Start-Up to Sustainability, Marketing Yourself Guide (with Sarah Hulse), Copyediting’s Grammar Tune-Up Workbook, and 1001 Words for Success: Synonyms, Antonyms & Homonyms. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading and a Full Member of ACES. Follow her on LinkedIn and Bluesky.