The recent advances in generative AI represent not just a significant step forward in the development of artificial intelligence, but they also have the potential to greatly transform the way we do business.

There are now ready-made tools that are accessible to all businesses like ChatGPT and DALL-E that have the ability to improve processes and productivity and save time and money. But what’s available right now is likely to look insignificant compared to the changes yet to come.

If you look at the way email communication, or search engines, e-commerce or smart phones developed from year-one to where they are today, there’s generally a pattern of some initial first movers, then a whole eco-system of options evolving in the coming years.

The challenges for small to medium businesses will be to sift through the cool gimmicks to find the most practical options and uses for their specific business.

Rather than running after shiny new technology, the trick is to find genuine ways to integrate AI with your day to day processes to start saving time and money – starting with what’s available now, but keeping a keen eye on the changing technology as well.

In some ways, at this point in the cycle, generative AI is similar to the introduction of something like the spreadsheet. Sure, it doesn’t sound as sexy or exciting when you put it like that, but it needs to be seen as a tool that helps you do your work more efficiently. It can’t necessarily work miracles, it still needs to be carefully managed in terms of what inputs you put in, and how you trust and treat the results that come out.

But imagine doing certain tasks or even entire business functions these days without a spreadsheet – you wouldn’t even consider it. This is how we’ll come to view generative AI in the future.

Ultimately, generative AI can be used as a tool and integrated with other processes and software to ensure it meets your business goals, saving you time and money, allowing you to perform once complex and time consuming tasks much more easily, and freeing up your time to focus on growing other areas of your business.