AI is certainly a conundrum in business and our personal lives. During the summer of 2024 I was given a rare opportunity to work with OpenAI with an enterprise license. I was prompt engineer trained by their team while attempting to use their platform to write research papers solely on the backs of a GPT prompt, do data analysis, and find its limitations. Since then, I have become an ai "expert" having used multiple different forms of ai to make videos, images, coding scripts, SEO revamps for websites and recently integrated Claude with Jobber where quotes are spit out instantaneously instead of spending 45 minutes to an hour building a quote.
The issue that I've seen across the businesses and folks we've helped is Artificial Intelligence isn't being treated as a tool. It's being treated as a silver bullet. Something that WILL solve everything. To your point there is an aspect of being human with our ability to empathize, sympathize, and generally have our human emotions related to one another. That is something no ai can do. It's become easy for me to spot ai written responses, messages, emails because of the lack of emotional tone attached to sentence structure amongst other... punctuation items that only ai uses. It's a huge turn off as a consumer that you're not willing to talk to me "face-to-face" when I'm using my emotionally & physically draining hard-earned cash on your product. It's such a turnoff for me that I will not do business with you when I see that ai is solely being used.
As we've grown as a consulting firm, we have really pushed that ai is just a tool. Nothing more. It's a stopgap to alleviate certain items from causing your business to overwhelm you. Or a tool to help maximize areas that are taking a significant amount of your time. However, there will ALWAYS need to be human involvement along the way somewhere. Anywhere that is customer facing in communication... I have strong sentiments that pushback the notion on allowing that interaction to happen. In my opinion your communication touchpoints with customers should never have ai's handprints on them. Human communication is 77% nonverbal (body posture, tone, sarcasm) so when you have written messages by ai you're losing customers without even knowing. Losing customers is easier than ever so in my opinion it should be the last option when communicating with them.
I digress... I could go very far into this conversation. From one business owner to another hopefully these anecdotes and stories give some help on how to proceed as a business owner.
What are the areas you've seen ai help? Have you seen the opposite ring true with using it to communicate with your customers?
Matt
Kalea Consulting
