Like with many new technologies, there’s a lot of confusion about how to use AI in your business and especially where to get started. Here are our 5 tips for practical things you can implement today to introduce AI into your business.

Encourage your team to play.

AI tools can be fun to interact with. For many years, using computers for your job has been mostly spreadsheets and boring data entry. With AI it can instead feel like you’re talking to a coworker who is happy to help you out. Give your team permission to spend 15-30 minutes of their day just using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to see if it can do something for them. For example, if you’re writing marketing content, see if it can give you a starting outline, write a headline, or help you brainstorm a list like this one. 

Choose an AI champion.

Find someone on your team who is excited about AI and encourage them to really dig deep. Give them time to experiment, to try to solve their own problems, and most importantly to go out and tell the rest of the company about it. No one knows your company and its challenges better than the people who are doing the work, so having a champion on the inside is a great way to get exactly what you need from the AI tools tailored to your business.

Buy the licenses.

If you are a Google shop, make sure you have the Gemini licenses. If you have a Slack, make sure you have the Slack AI offering. Get a license to ChatGPT. The important thing about the team licenses is they allow you to put more private confidential data in for the AI to use and most importantly, the public AI models won’t be trained on the data that you put in. If you pay for the licenses, they’re much more secure. The last thing you want is for your competitors to go to ChatGPT and say “how do I assemble this widget” and have it give them your proprietary secret recipe. 

Automate what you hate.

Pick something you hate doing like processing handwritten data, spending time moving data from one spreadsheet to another, or writing the script to your video podcast. Then have ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude help you do that thing. 

Don’t try to get everything done right away; keep it simple. Technology is evolving so fast that in three months there are going to be new options that you didn’t have when you set it up. Start small and build up positive steps forward by revisiting your process on a regular basis. Think of it this way: if you could buy yourself five minutes today, that gives you five minutes more tomorrow to think about AI and to improve your business. Then tomorrow you might buy yourself ten minutes. Those time savings add up like compounding interest, and they will compound not just for you, but for your entire company and all of your employees.

Empower instead of eliminate.

We’re all watching the headlines about how businesses are “hiring” AI and laying off employees. That scenario can be really scary for your employees and make AI the enemy. It’s important for leaders to express to their employees what they will do with AI and what they won’t do with AI. 

The Industrial Revolution was transformative and the AI Revolution is only going to echo that. Back then, employees were freed up from jobs where they were making things one-by-one with their hands to then be able to invent new tools and new types of jobs. That’s what’s happening with AI too. Make sure that your employees know that you are empowering them to make their jobs and work environment better and more productive with AI tools and everyone at your company will benefit.

Want to learn more? Check out our podcast: Episode #1 Practical AI Tips

(art by Becka Rahn)