COMMENTARY: Companies of all sizes are now expected to understand AI's relevance to their business and integrate it into their products and services to benefit customers. For large companies, there can be abundant resources and personnel dedicated to finding the right AI solution. However, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and managed service providers (MSPs) often do not have the capital or resources to distinguish between what would be most useful to their organization versus which AI offerings are overhyped (or, in other words – b*llsh*t).
While some companies with tighter budgets might be worried about their ability to assess the viability of current or potential AI solutions, there are three steps that all SMBs should consider to determine whether an AI tool will be game-changing or fall flat.
1: The practical AI litmus test
The first question that companies should ask themselves is about purpose. This means connecting the AI tool or platform’s offering to its real-world application within an IT environment.
Here’s an example: A small cybersecurity consultancy is looking for an AI solution to help its analysts determine if emails are safe or if they are phishing attempts. In this hypothetical scenario, let's assume that an AI platform is offering this company a way to automatically detect whether an email was written by AI or by a human. While impressive – is this capability truly helpful? To be ‘worth it,’ the AI solution would need to offer deeper insights into potential malicious activity for each email; simply noting whether AI was involved in its creation does not indicate the potential dangers of its contents.
Another aspect of this litmus test is ensuring that organizations ask for case studies that illustrate how it’s worked for others. That way, resource-constrained companies have insights into operational efficiency gains, as well as time and cost-saving metrics to assess the return on investment.
2: Drilling into the details before implementation
Once an AI tool is deemed potentially useful, it's time to focus on questions related to how the AI solution will look specifically within an MSP or SMB and how it will integrate into current processes.
Leaders, usually IT buyers or CEOs of MSPs, need to ask and answer:
Without properly analyzing and planning for all aspects of an AI platform's integration, SMBs and MSPs risk unexpected costs and time dedication to this cause that could have been avoided with careful initial planning.
3: Beyond the hype: elevating AI features
Regardless of where a company is in its AI adoption journey, one thing to always keep top of mind is distinguishing between overhyped AI features and those that can drive real organizational change.
Adopting a step-by-step evaluation process to confirm the viability of an AI offering is paramount. Things like organizing a pilot program, establishing what metrics or KPIs need to be hit in the first six months of using a new AI tool to establish success, and building out relevant risk mitigation strategies will all elevate the usefulness and potential of AI within an organization.
Avoiding BS AI for all future considerations
Gaining clarity on which AI tools or platforms are just novel versus utilitarian should not be avoided. But for small and medium-sized businesses or MSPs, the need to be more strategic to take full advantage of their resources and personnel is key to sustainably and successfully growing their AI posture. Carefully evaluating the long-term value of AI within an organization is always done on a case-by-case basis. But if done correctly, there is a lot of opportunity to scale and evolve in a world that is quickly adopting artificial intelligence and increasing their expectations for how companies of all sizes deliver on the promise of AI.
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