What can AI actually do for your business (and what it can't)

Almost every business owner I speak to wants 'something with AI' these days. They've tried ChatGPT, they read about clever agents that take work off your hands and they feel like they're missing the boat if they do nothing. Part of that hype is genuinely justified, because the technology has become remarkably good over the past few years. But when I ask what exactly they want to use AI for, it usually goes quiet.

That's where the real problem sits. Nobody doubts anymore that AI is powerful; the only question is what you point it at. Artificial intelligence isn't a destination but a tool that's exactly right for one job and completely wrong for another.

AI doesn't fit every task

Take the cost. It happens regularly that a business turns a heavy AI model loose on work a simple piece of software would handle just as well. That's a bit like renting a lorry to deliver a single letter: it arrives, but you've overpaid and a bike would have been quicker. Every time an AI is involved it costs money and processing time, and across a few thousand invoices a month that adds up surprisingly fast.

Do you want the same answer every time, or something new?

But the cost isn't even the main thing. The biggest misunderstanding lies somewhere else, in something almost nobody explains even though it decides everything in practice: do you want a task to give you the same result every time or something new? Generative AI is built to come up with a fresh answer each time, so if you ask it the same question twice, there's a good chance you'll get two slightly different results. When you're drafting an email that's actually a nice thing, because you get a fresh wording instead of the same sentence over and over. But try working out an invoice total with it. You don't want an amount that's 'usually' right, and you certainly don't want an order landing with the correct department one time and somewhere else the next because the model happened to guess differently that day.

Honestly, the vast majority of what happens in a business falls into that second category. A VAT calculation, a confirmation that needs to go out, data moving from one system to another: there you don't want creativity but predictability. A simple script that does exactly the same thing every time is more reliable and cheaper than any AI model.

Not sure which is which? Take a few everyday tasks and have a go before you check the answer.

Where AI does make the difference

That doesn't mean AI is useless, quite the opposite. There's a whole category of work where it's the best tool there is. It's almost always work that involves language, or information that comes in slightly different every time. Think of sorting incoming emails so the important ones rise to the top, drafting a first reply that you only need to check, pulling the essence out of a long quote request or routing customer questions to the right colleague. For that kind of task there's no fixed rule to write, simply because no two emails are identical. That's exactly where AI comes into its own.

Start with the task, not the tool

The biggest mistake I see businesses make is starting with the tool instead of the problem. They decide they want 'something with AI' and only then go looking for a place to apply it, when it works far better the other way round. Start with the one task that swallows hours every week and only then look at which tool solves it best. Sometimes that's AI, often a simple script turns out to be enough and most of the time it's a combination of both.

Wondering which job to point it at first? That is its own question, and I wrote about it here: Which tasks should you automate first?