Harnessing the Power of Generative AI for Small Business
You no longer have to be a big tech company, or even technically proficient, to reap the benefits of generative AI large language models (LLMs). Small businesses are using this class of tools to speed production on all varieties of marketing and coding initiatives.
Whether you want these foundation models to compose a blog post, business proposal, or even a jingle for your next social media ad campaign, AI can accommodate – with the right inputs.
“Products like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, as well as the underlying AI models that power such systems (Stable Diffusion, DALL·E 2, GPT-3, to name a few), are taking technology into realms once thought to be reserved for humans,” explains McKinsey & Company. “With generative AI, computers can now arguably exhibit creativity. They can produce original content in response to queries, drawing from data they’ve ingested and interactions with users.”
See how SMBs are using digital content generators to democratize asset creation while navigating a bit of ethical ambiguity.
How Small Businesses are Harnessing AI
With a few examples and a moderately proficient prompt, generative AI models can spit out any manner and length of content faster than you can update your operating system.
Whether you’re a supervisor trying to perfect your interoffice communications, or a marketer who’s been asked to find a problem within your website’s code, machine learning models can help. Once too complicated for anyone without years of specialized data engineering experience, this newest generation of generative AI simply requires an insightful prompt engineer.
The tools are simple to operate and free to use – for now. If you can craft an insightful, specific question and spend a little time in “post” editing the output, you can automatically and almost instantly generate fresh, valuable assets, including:
- Written content like thought leadership pieces, blog posts, or social media messaging.
- Data-driven information that uses patterns to draw out and present compelling stats for materials like case studies.
- Visual and auditory experiences. Think: original images, videos, and music compositions that help SMBs engage diverse audiences.
- Marketing segmentation that optimizes emails, messages, or advertisements based on the preferences of targeted user groups.
Some SMBs are approaching generative AI and other foundation models like technology partners, helping them speed up their application development without undergoing lengthy, expensive training.
Limitations of Generative AI
For all that these LLMs can offer small businesses, there are still plenty of practical considerations that are giving some companies pause.
Some of those limitations and challenges include, “Quality of generated outputs, control over generated outputs, computational requirements, bias and fairness, explainability and interpretability, and safety and security,” says Fact Protocol. “These limitations and challenges need to be addressed to ensure the effectiveness and safety of generative AI technology.”
What This Means for the Future: Power Back to Smaller Companies?
Some optimists like Teresa Tung, a chief cloud technologist at Accenture, predict that bigger companies may lose their monopoly on technology innovation as leaner organizations learn to do more with less. With “570 GB of data taken from [millions of] books and the internet” and more than $1.7 billion of venture capital investment, these simple question-answer tools are likely to revolutionize the competitive advantage of SMBs worldwide.
