Introduction to AI

Before you can think about investing in AI, it’s important to understand what it actually is and how it differs from traditional software you are used to.

Software vs AI: what’s the difference?

Most businesses already rely on software to run their day-to-day. Accounting platforms, CRMs, booking systems. These tools are incredibly powerful, but they all share one thing in common: they work by following rules that someone has clearly defined.

If your website has a contact form, software can automatically create those same fields in your CRM every time. But if your contact form or CRM changes, your automation breaks and it’s time to pay more in consulting fees.

Software works by following rules. When those rules break so does the software.

When dealing with unstructured data like emails and documents, it’s simply not possible to create rules to cover every scenario. That’s where AI comes in.

How AI works

AI doesn’t require a strict set of rules to operate. It can work with any text, audio, image or video. When AI is trained, it uses mountains of training data to learn the patterns required to complete different tasks.

That’s why AI can read invoices from hundreds of different suppliers, even though no two look the same.

Your inbox is a good example. Every day, emails arrive that need judgement: an unusual request, a complaint, a supplier chasing an update. No rule can cover all of it.

That’s exactly what AI is designed to do. Rather than following a fixed set of rules, AI is trained to recognise patterns, understand context, and make decisions in situations that aren’t black and white.

So if software handles the clearly defined tasks in your business, AI is what handles everything in between.

A real world example

Let’s take a small business who has a simple website with a contact form that they want to connect to their CRM.

Software would be able to handle any rules-based workflow such as creating a new contact and lead, then copying over the email, phone number and name fields. This is the exact same process every time and there’s no need to get AI involved.

Now let’s say that every time a new lead came in, you wanted to automatically research the company and then send them a custom email with some relevant case studies specific to their business and requirements.

Researching the web involves way too many variables for software to be a solution here, and selecting relevant case studies would be crude at best if worked off a simple rule like keyword matching.

This is where AI comes in, to handle the tasks that are too complex for traditional software. For AI, the task of researching the web to find out more about the new contact and select relevant case studies is straightforward and easy to implement. With software, it would be impossible to get it performing well.

It is not a matter of choosing one or the other, software should be used where possible with AI doing what software is not able to accomplish.

Why this matters for your business

Every business has gaps. Moments where the process breaks down and a person has to step in to use their judgement. Some of those moments are high value and absolutely should involve a human. But many of them are repetitive, time consuming, and quietly eating into your team’s day.

AI doesn’t replace your people. It takes the more complex, repetitive tasks that software can’t handle and handles them, freeing your team to focus on the work that actually needs them.

All of the gaps where software has fallen short in the past can now be filled with AI. We have seen how software has transformed the way businesses operate in the past, removing massive amounts of manual admin and repetitive work. AI presents that same opportunity on a much larger scale, able to go beyond simple rules-based task and being able to handle the dynamic, everchanging realities of day-to-day business.