“What do I need to know about AI?”

This may be the question that clients most often ask me.

I understand their concern. Technology makes us smaller. Business owners are desperate for ways to connect with their customers to stay relevant. I think the rapid adoption of this new tool stems from AI FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Where (and how) does staying at the cutting edge of technology ensure success?

Our ability to customize and elevate customer relationships has changed significantly in the past few decades. What started as cellular transformed into “dot com,” and with it came social networks that decentralized media authority, allowing anyone with a Wi-Fi connection to have a voice and engage with companies in a two-way dialogue.

What We Already Know

We’ve seen how our customers engage with content that matters to them and curate screen time experiences using search engines to help them scratch their latest itch.

This gives businesses the ability to think strategically, identify how best to reduce media advertising waste and reach their target audience at the moment of intent (i.e. when someone is searching for your service and finds you from a paid ad).

We want to capture as much customer information as possible and engage meaningfully with that data. But with all this data we have amassed, how much is actionable by a business owner?

When it comes to data, your past can become your present and future. All those posts you liked, articles you read, or apps you downloaded now live in some data warehouse and paint a digital profile of you. That means you might be on a list that says you are interested in horses or a cruise in Tahiti, but is that still the case?

AI’s New Challenges

Regarding AI, the concept of data integrity and the evolution of a customer’s journey are critical to understand. AI works by feeding it information and using data to guide the artificial intelligence to think and act on your behalf to achieve a satisfactory end result.

But customer wants and needs aren’t static. Will the AI you train today be able to resonate with the customers of tomorrow?

I don’t think so. Too many things contribute to our customers’ journey online, from the media sources they trust to the content they engage with to socio-cultural shifts.

In my book, The Covert Code, I explain the importance of maintaining control of the areas you can control. This means not taking shortcuts like “setting and forgetting” online bid strategies or generating core website content using ChatGPT. It also means that business owners must have a clear vision and foster a corporate culture that places trust in people first and data second.

The Limits of AI

While AI can be used to help businesses streamline processes and reduce redundancies, it can also limit your ability to scale and negatively impact your ROI if not carefully monitored and controlled. I encourage my clients to consider this question: Are your business choices today sustainable with so many AI unknowns?

What might seem like a cost-saving strategy might quickly become a bottleneck and result in you knowing even less about your customer’s journey, missing new trends, or locking you into technology decisions that will increase your long-term cost-per-lead, cost-per-demo, and cost-per-sale.

There are opportunities to leverage AI as a tool to support your team by doing “things” that they can’t or won’t do. One example is called listening and monitoring. Are you reviewing calls or spot-checking them based on the caller’s source, such as Google Ads? If not, implementing AI and training it to conduct call-listening and tag potential issues would be low-risk and high-reward.

AI Has Its Proper Place

If your business is Santa’s workshop, AI solutions should be the elves assembling the toys, wrapping them tight, and mailing them out to all the little boys and girls. They shouldn’t create a wish list or identify what the workshop will manufacture that year.

So, if you’re experiencing AI FOMO, take a breath. Look to your business first, figuring out what’s needed to expand your reach and ease your workload. There’s nothing artificial about that kind of intelligence.