The topic for our newsletter and blogs this month is “Taking advantage of opportunities.” It’s up to company leadership to keep careful watch of potential opportunities for the company and its products and services.
When setting out and setting up to take advantage of opportunities, though, the wrong thing to do is rely too heavily on artificial intelligence.
AI Has Risen
For better or for worse, artificial intelligence has fully arrived and is very certainly here to stay. AI is used in video, the written word, illustrations, music, search engines, and many other places.
Some warn of “artificial intelligence taking over” and some kind of impending Terminator-type threat. Others are singing its praises and how it can replace various tasks in our lives and business. The proper balance is somewhere in the middle.
Opportunity Research
Company leadership should always be on the lookout for new opportunities. For example, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management)* software company finds that there are CRM applications for specific professions, such as auto sales and real estate. How might they sell their generalized CRM offering to these fields?
There are two different ways they could research that question. First, they could look online at other successful CRM applications that offer different CRM patterns for specific industries. How are they offering them? They discover that others sell add-ons to their CRMs for the most popular industries. Our developer begins adding such options into their own CRM and finds success in it.
Another way, though, would be to ask an AI engine, “For specific industries, what else could we offer our CRM customers?” The AI might give them the same information they would have obtained had they done the research themselves, saving them considerable time.
Over-Reliance
Now that the CRM developer has had some benefit from using artificial intelligence and has had some success with the results, they might go on and use it for further research. There’s certainly nothing wrong with doing so. For example, they might pose the question to AI, “What other improvements for our CRM should we offer that would become popular?” AI replies with a list of the latest functionality and add-ons that are popular with other applications, uses them, and sees even further success.
There can come a point, though, of over-reliance on AI. For example, the company management starts utilizing AI results without really evaluating them, since they’ve had success with them in the past. One day, the owner checks in and sees that sales are flattening out and beginning to drop off. She finds that management incorporated one of AI’s suggestions—a “low code no code” offering that allows users to greatly customize the CRM software. There is then no need for customers to purchase add-ons or, in some cases, new software versions.
Customers stop coming back. The manager loses his job, and the owner is tearing her hair out, trying to figure out how to restore the CRM application to its former success.
The Missing Ingredient
What’s missing in this example? Judgment. If someone had come in before the developer added the “low code no code” option, the owner, seeing that sales would be lost, might have said, “No way! If they want options, we’ll professionally code and provide them!” But the suggestion had come from AI, which had provided good suggestions up to that point. The owner had instructed the manager to follow AI’s suggestions. The manager, wanting to do a good job, just took the “low code no code” suggestion and ran with it.
The problem with over-reliance on AI is exactly that: loss of judgment. No business should ever lose the capacity to judge which opportunities it should take on and weigh them against the company’s current successful product and service offerings.
Note that a business owner or executive may see this cautionary tale as obvious—as the owner of our CRM development company did—but it may not be so apparent to the staff, as in the case of our manager. Over-reliance on AI becomes a bad habit that can then become a standard.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay—but no matter what, don’t lose your judgment.
To learn more, sign up at SELLability.com.
Recent Comments