Artificial intelligence (AI) is surrounded by a huge hype but it also has a real potential to change the way we perform some tasks. If you're trying to figure out what are the first steps to take, keep on reading. In this article Henri Jääskeläinen, CEO of Polar Night Software – Finnish-Polish software development nearshoring company – gives a few basic tips on how to get started.
Should everyone know something about AI?
Gaining a basic understanding of AI is essential for all. Start by reading high-level articles on the subject and experimenting with tools like ChatGPT for text generation or DALL-E for images. This hands-on experience will offer a glimpse into the current possibilities and future potential of AI. We can assume that the current AI services are just baby steps towards more advanced and mature solutions.
What are the currently popular AI services good at?
Popular AI services rely on machine learning (ML) models. In simple terms, these models ingest data, identify patterns, and make predictions or classifications. With more data, they continuously improve their performance. For instance, they can determine whether there's a car in a picture or recommend a movie. While they excel at decision-making in narrow tasks, the definition of "narrow" is constantly expanding.
The hottest topic right now is generative AIs. They first ingest data, recognize patterns, and then do the opposite: create data using the patterns they learned. The output can be for example images or text. ChatGPT is the most famous example of a generative AI.
Should you use AI in your business?
After you have scratched the surface by testing some of the available tools yourself, you should be able to ask better questions to people in charge of developing your digital services. Perhaps you are able to do something that would have been too time-consuming in the past, like browse through huge amounts of text or images? Or do things in a more user-friendly way, like create a smarter chatbot for customer support? Maybe you want to analyze how the discussion in your company’s social media channels is developing - is it more negative or positive?
Find the real-life use cases. Don’t invest time or money into AI just because it sounds cool at the moment. If you want to serve your customers, don’t focus on the hype. Only you can answer the question if your company could benefit from using AI tools, so do your homework.
“Everyone thinks that their needs are unique, but usually companies don’t need to start building their own machine learning models. Big players have put hundreds of millions into the development of AI. You should just find out what your needs are and try to find if someone already built a service that meets these needs.
At Polar Night Software, we have plugged some of our customers’ products into existing AI services. For most of us, this is the way to get the real-life benefits of the AI revolution. If your company needs help doing this, we are happy to help.”
- Henri Jääskeläinen, CEO of Polar Night Software
Are there safety concerns in using AI tools? Be careful about giving your own or your customer’s data to a service that doesn’t tell how it will use it. Never disclose anything confidential. Many services are vague about how they utilize the information they receive, potentially using it to train their machine learning models. Samsung, for instance, learned this the hard way when employees inadvertently leaked trade secrets while using ChatGPT. You can read more about it here: https://mashable.com/article/samsung-chatgpt-leak-details
Tips for finding the benefits of AI for your business
Regardless of your role, stay up-to-date - at least on a high level.
Talk to the people developing your company’s core digital services. Ask questions.
Try to think a step ahead: “How will this work when most typical issues are fixed?” Development may be surprisingly fast.
Probably you don’t need to “build your own AI”. You just need to use what others have already built and plug it into your own product or service.
Polar Night Software is a Finnish-Polish company that offers software development
nearshoring services. They deliver web applications, mobile applications and integrations plus we do development team extensions. The company has also helped its customers to integrate their products with AI services.
If you would like to hear more, you can contact Henri directly: Henri Jääskeläinen
henri@polarnightsoftware.com
+48 731 407 479
Are you interested in entering the Polish market? How about boosting your sales or acquiring talents in Poland? Look no further! Spondeo is a dedicated team of experts who specialize in consulting, sales, remote recruitment, and go-to-market projects in CEE and Scandinavia. Contact us: Tuomas Asunmaa tuomas@spondeo.fi +48 514 615 048