Generative AI is no longer just the cool new thing; it’s a powerful tool for business growth that organizations like yours should be leveraging. If you don’t use AI, you’ll be at a disadvantage compared to your competitors who do, and that’s no good. That said, there’s a massive difference between those who dabble in AI and those who use it masterfully, and that difference is going to grow more significant over time.
Today, we’ve got five tips to help you use AI in a proficient way so you can beat out the competition.
AI outputs are only as valuable as their inputs, which means that if you want to receive exceptional content, you need to provide enough context.
Unless you’re injecting your specific brand DNA into all of your AI prompts, you’ll continue to receive the same bland, soulless responses. We recommend that you upload your last five newsletters or social media posts so the AI can analyze your style. Then it should be able to put together something that sounds more like you, but more importantly, it becomes harder for generic AI to replicate you.
AI shouldn’t be used as a search engine. Instead, try using it like a project manager.
Proficient AI users will move toward agentic AI, which is where the tool doesn’t just answer questions, but also performs multi-step tasks autonomously. In other words, you’re not asking it to simply write an email; you’re asking it to use a workflow to handle the entire administrative chain. When prompted well, AI can summative a meeting transcript, identify the most important action items, and draft personalized follow-up emails for everyone involved.
Efficiency is a great reason to use AI, but AI-only content is becoming so commonplace that it’s going to get easier and easier for your customers to spot it.
But what if, instead of letting AI do all the work, you have a human behind the wheel, guiding it through the process? AI can do the researching, drafting, and formatting, and you have a human employee adding the soul its work desperately needs. The human can review any customer-facing content to ensure its quality and authenticity—without all the hard work of the rest of the process.
AI might be “the next big thing,” but truly proficient users will use it to solve the biggest problems with your business. For example, if scheduling is an issue, you should use AI for that. The same can be said for data analysis or any other task.
We recommend you take the three most repetitive, monotonous tasks and use AI to address these areas through automation. Remember that the value of AI is going to be in how much time and stress it saves you, not how “cool” the output is.
Small businesses need to be aware of the data leaks that can occur when using public AI models. This is why it’s important to know what you can (and shouldn’t) share with your AI tools. This is to protect the reputation of your customers.
For example, you should never, ever share customer data, especially if it’s something that is private in nature, like health information or financial records. We recommend you use anonymized data instead. So, you might not want to use your customers’ names, but you can use Customer A or Customer B instead when looking to spot new trends in your data.
Want to give your AI use a boost? Schedule a strategy call today with First Column IT.
