AI – The new thing – answer to everything?

You can’t read the news, look at LinkedIn or do a Google search these days without being bombarded by information about or from AI. Information on AI is everywhere, and for many, there is too much – too many options, I don’t know enough about the implications of exposing our data, what tool do I choose? What problem do I solve first?

It seems everyone wants AI – and then wants to know what to do with their new thing afterwards.

AI is not that new. AI has been in active development since 1985. Toward the end of the 80s, the AI industry was worth a billion dollars.

The Terminator

The 90s saw the AI winter – where investment dropped significantly. I blame the success of the movie ‘The Terminator’ personally – “we were going to be consumed by AI and killed off.” There is still a real fear that AI will be the end of civilization. Is the fear justified – who knows?

As computing power increased, so did research and activity around AI. The 2000s have seen rapid growth in the use of AI, until now in the 2020s – we see a massive boom in the availability of AI to the general public. ChatGPT led the way, but there are a lot of tools available now.

I work for a company based in New Zealand called Xtracta . Xtracta has been founded on an AI base to do one simple task – extract data from documents. You might think – OCR, that’s been around for ages, and yes, it has. But an AI-powered OCR enables the system to think about what it is capturing, learn from examples, and improve its ability and accuracy.

Xtracta spends a lot of energy looking at new technologies available and embedding them into our service offering. The most common uses of Xtracta are the capture of data from supplier invoices or orders from customers – all being fed into the company’s ERP system. But Xtracta also captures millions of pages of bank statements as part of a process for mortgage approvals, patient information forms for medical organisations onboarding new patients for medical tests or procedures, rental documents, and energy usage recording. If someone must spend significant time entering data from documents to systems – Xtracta can help you! We might not be able to send robots back in time to end life as we know it – but we can save your team significant amounts of time and make your processes more efficient.

Rather than jumping out and buying an AI tool, or using the free options with your company data, you should be thinking about your current processes and what you would like to do to improve them. Then look at ways to make improvements; AI is just one of the options. Consider the privacy of your information before sending your company secrets off to the Internet.

Where are people spending the most time – is there an opportunity to spend less time on a task if you used an AI tool, or can you sell more of your product or provide more service to the public if you used AI?

Then you need to consider a project to utilise a new tool or service and how that will improve your efficiency or offerings. It may be more appropriate to engage a service that includes AI rather than having to build your own offering from scratch.

The Mahi Tahi Collective has members who can help advise on process improvement, adoption of AI in your organisation, or practical applications such as Xtracta Document Capture to get your organisation into the AI space in a controlled manner. Please reach out to us and let us help.

This article is part of a content series by the members of Mahi Tahi, a group of tech businesses whose mission is to transform New Zealand’s productivity through partnership. Learn more by viewing our website here: https://mahitahi.tech