You can’t talk about business these days without talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI). It’s all the rage, and it’s generating plenty of rage.
It’s going to make all our jobs easier, or it’s going to eat all our jobs. Some young people rely on it, and some old-school people are terrified of it.
As with any groundbreaking technology, from the wheel to the Internet, its positive or negative impact lies in how and how well it’s used.
One thing that most everyone agrees on: using AI just because you think you should isn’t a sure path to greater success or profit. All technology should serve a clear and important purpose for your customers, management, or staff, or it’s not worth your time and energy.
Here are two pros and cons when it comes to integrating AI into your business model:
Pro: Your staff will become more productive. If you have staff cold-calling to generate new customer leads, AI can – and should – do that for them. One of the best uses of AI is data analysis. If you ask a team member to find the local zip code with the largest number of homes built within 20 years (prime candidates for replacement systems), it would take them many hours – if they could even figure out how to start the research. AI can produce the answer within seconds. That means your employees can spend their time selling rather than figuring out who to sell to.
The same goes for automated follow-up calls or texts, mining your current customer data, or developing social media posts or ads. AI does a good job at many things in a very short time. That means you can redirect your staff to the complex in-person tasks that only humans can do.
Pro: Reducing staff hours cuts labor costs. Every hour of labor cost carries a benefits burden up to 30 percent of the employee’s salary. From paid time off to workers’ comp, human hours are expensive. If AI helps eliminate overtime or answers phone calls on holidays, it reduces the staff hours needed, increasing your profitability. That’s one of the most important factors in your company’s valuation. And AI never calls in sick; tasks that are delegated to AI continue even when your office manager takes a day off.
Con: AI implemented sloppily can drive away business. I’ve spoken with many owners who are using AI to answer phone calls. “But there’s always an option for them to choose to speak to a live person,” they’ll say. That’s an important feature to add, but you may never know how much business you lose because of frustration with an automated system. (The same thing happened the first time businesses automated answering and leaving voice messages.)
A customer whose first language isn’t English may struggle to understand or speak to automated systems. An elderly customer may get frustrated with talking to a “computer” (channeling my elderly aunt here). A dissatisfied or angry customer is going to feel like they’re getting the runaround, even if that’s not remotely what you intended. Sometimes, efficiency and profitability might not be the top priority, especially in your customers’ minds.
Con: AI can be like a fraudster: it’s not telling the truth, but it sounds so convincing that it’s tempting to believe it is. We’ve already seen cases of very smart and experienced professionals who have cited legal cases, medical studies, and pop-culture gossip that simply never happened. They’re plausible, and they feel like the truth, but AI was “hallucinating,” telling the user what it thought they wanted to hear. If you have staff using AI for research or advice that matters, be sure they are well trained to check the facts and view the results they get with healthy skepticism. Any technology, especially one that’s thinking for itself, is only as good as the humans who are charged with the final oversight of it.
One of the most important benefits of AI is that you don’t need a programmer to develop a new system or code an app. You can literally tell it what you need and ask it to produce a plan. That’s a powerful tool, and one that will undoubtedly make every company more profitable in the future.
The jury is still out on how much impact AI will have on the typical HVAC company’s value. My views might be different in a year or two, when we have more data from buyers and sellers. I’m old enough to have experienced the entire digital revolution, and we had the same great expectations and the same fears about personal computing when it debuted in the 90s. Now I can’t imagine running a company with all paper-based systems.
P.S.: In case you’re wondering, this post is 100 percent human-generated. There are some things I still think we do better than machines.
