How AI and Industry Automation Are Transforming Small-Medium Businesses – Part 1

The AI chatbot ChatGPT landed with a lot of fanfare around November 2022. Since then most of you have played around with it and other chatbots and many of you have now integrated them into your daily work.

What I wanted to explore in this client briefing series is where I foresee artificial intelligence going and what we as small and medium size businesses need to be thinking about and doing to ensure we survive and thrive as artificial intelligence begins to permeate each industry that we operate in. Just because your industry has been fairly constant for several decades, don’t think AI and automation won’t cause rapid changes to your business in the next 5 to 10 years, or sooner.

I’m going to break this topic into three parts. In part one, I look at the short-term implications – namely how we can use the AI tools that are currently available. In part two, the next client briefing, I’ll look at the mid-term implications of AI, what we can expect and what we need to start preparing for as small businesses. In part three, the final briefing of the series, I’ll give you my thoughts and predictions on how different industries could be impacted and which businesses are likely to survive and/or thrive.

AI and Industry Automation – Part One: Short Term – Now and Next Year

In part one, I’m going to explore and explain the impact to small business of:

1. ChatGPT

2. Autonomous Machines

3. Job Roles that have been Replaced or Changed

As you read this and you have any questions or comments, I encourage you to jot them down. Feel free to email me with your thoughts or questions and I’ll respond and/or incorporate them in the next briefing.

1. ChatGPT in small business

If you haven’t already incorporated tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot into your day-to-day work, you really need to. Think of it as a virtual assistant that you can throw tasks to, sometimes they’ll do a good job that you can use or refine. Sometimes they do a poor job and you’ll have to reexplain the task a different way or in more detail.

I won’t go into detail here, but some of the situations our clients are using AI for include:

• Preparing a response to an email
• Writing a job description or a job ad
• Summarising and providing insights after feeding the AI data, such as job profitability
• Designing a logo
• Creating a page of content for a website

The AI output is never perfect. It still requires you to adjust it and refine it to suit your purposes. But it does avoid you staring at an empty screen thinking what to type. It cuts down the time it takes to do these tasks because AI can often do between 50% to 80% of the grunt work for you. You’ll still have to do the polishing.

Keep in mind that the AI tools are getting better and better as they go. ChatGPT 4o is a lot better than ChatGPT 3.5.

Just like a new employee you bring into your business, the tools will develop and produce better results over time. If you practice, you also will become a better user of the tools, learning how to give better instructions or prompts to get better results. Just like managing an employee.

2. Autonomous Machines in Unstructured Environments

There have been robots in factories for many years, but now we’re starting to see these robots move into unstructured environments like building sites and agricultural sites. The industrial revolution saw humans begin to mass-produce items in factories and thus improved the types of products, their quality and availability, and then it cut the cost of modern items like fridges, TVs and cars. It costs about the same to buy a car today as it did in the 1970s – with a lot more features on a current model. However other industries such as construction haven’t seen the benefits of automation. Imagine if you could build a house for the same price it cost to build one in the 1970s.

We now have autonomous machines working in unstructured environments (think outdoor and more unpredictable). Review the following videos to understand the developments:

Autonomous excavator

Wall construction promotional video (1 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wmotyKgXc

For more detail, see the engineering explanation of the above (9 mins):

Robotic Pile Driver

Pile driving robot promotional video (3 mins):

Autonomous fruit picking

Promotional video (2 mins):

You can see the robot in use here (2 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzaaSIEDg7s

These autonomous robots are in the early stage of their development, but once they fully utilise the early stage ‘learnings’ and incorporate high levels of AI, they’ll be able to do a greater range of jobs and deal with greater variability in the environment.

Imagine an excavator that based on a set of plans can interpret the terrain of the site, dig holes and then lay rock and pipe, before covering everything over and preparing the site for aboveground construction to commence. This could happen through a 24 hour, 7 days a week cycle, all without the need for an operator.

With the intersection of cheaper robots and artificial intelligence technology, we’re going to see much faster changes to many of these unstructured areas across industries. Many of your businesses work in unstructured environments or service clients in unstructured environments, which means you need to be factoring the changes that are coming into your business strategy.

3. Job Roles that have been Replaced or Changed by AI and Automation

Some low-level job tasks are already starting to be substituted and, in some cases, replaced by AI:

• Graphic designers – for routine creative designs
• Radiologists – for initial interpretation of scan results
• Copywriters – for base level text for websites
• Basic financial analysts – for analysing large scale data of low importance
• Paralegals – for research of legislation and case law
• Online customer service – for responding to customer queries online and in apps
• Translators – for low level bulk translation work
• Computer programmers – for low level programming grunt work

At this stage, it is just low-level tasks but the recent uplift in investment in AI in these functions means the sophistication of the technology will develop quickly. At this stage, roles where a high level of creative thinking or a significant degree of interpretation of data is necessary still require a human with experience and insight.

Many other job roles are being enhanced by AI. In these roles, people are finding that AI augments what they’ve previously had to do and improves their efficiency and/or quality.

What this means for your business

Large companies with the resources to invest in research and development (and make mistakes along the way) are investing in artificial intelligence now. They have the advantage that their R&D spend can be deployed over tens of thousands of employees. As small businesses we don’t have these resources, but we need to stay up to date with the technology.

For Tenfold clients and other small-medium businesses looking to grow and scale up, I encourage you to develop your own skills with the technology. Try out many of the different AI tools and experiment with what they can do and how you prompt them. I’ve included some AI tools at the bottom of this briefing for you to try out.

The development of technology is moving fast and while it might have been ok for small businesses to move from paper-based processes to cloud-based job management systems over a 10-year period, the next step up in AI adoption will happen in 1-2 years. If you don’t learn how to use this technology now, you’ll risk being left behind as competitors adopt the technology and offer improved services to your clients.

In the next briefing, I’ll discuss the mid-term outlook for AI. I’ll explore what job roles will be replaced, and which ones will significantly change over the next 3 to 5 years.

Cheers,

Ash

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AI tools to try

https://numerous.ai/ using ChatGPT inside Google Sheets and Excel

https://www.logoai.com/ design logos and branding

https://www.copy.ai/ for creating different types of content

https://www.perplexity.ai/ for generating content or getting answers with links to reference sources

https://claude.ai/ use it to review documents, contracts and provide summaries and answer questions