Three Things to Know Before Jumping into AI

More of our clients – from manufacturing to retailers – are incorporating AI tools into their businesses. Here’s what to know before you jump in.

AI tools are becoming a part of business operations whether we like it or not. The applications we use every day, from Internet searches to cybersecurity analyses, are incorporating AI to help us work more quickly, accurately and safely.

For the last few years, at Matrix Integration, we’ve been leveraging AI tools in our strategic partner software suites for clients. We help customers fine-tune the automation capabilities within these suites to make critical decisions in their infrastructure.

If you haven’t started using AI tools yet, you should be thinking about it. As time and resources continue to crunch in maintaining your IT systems and security, AI tools can be leveraged to protect your data and get the most benefit out of what you already own.

Three Things for Businesses to Consider about AI

As AI becomes a more commonly built-in component of many managed software suites, here are the top three issues business should consider as the technology becomes more universal:

• Data quality matters. Whether you would like to use AI to generate content (such as drafting communications with customers) or analyze production efficiencies, high-quality data is necessary to train AI models. Already, biased inputs in large-language models like Chat GPT have led to biased outputs that could damage a company’s reputation on a great scale. In the case of data analysis, inaccurate or damaged data fed to an AI model will lead to unusable outputs.
• Data security isn’t guaranteed. Companies will need to consider how to secure their own data, as well as data supplied by clients. This requires asking questions and developing transparency and trust with cloud services providers as well as AI vendors. For example, many businesses provide customer-facing chatbots run by AI. Imagine that customers type sensitive or personal data (e.g., bank account numbers) into a chatbot. Or, as another example, a business supplies internal data to AI models to generate proprietary operations solutions. Is that data safe once it gets uploaded into a cloud-based AI application? Can it be used by other customers of that AI vendor?
• Humans are key for AI to work properly. Right now, much of AI seems to be a "black box" – most people understand the inputs and outputs but are unfamiliar with how learning algorithms work and how they handle data. For example, Microsoft 365 security tools through Defender, Sentinel, or the Purview compliance portal all do an excellent job of leveraging AI to make decisions and inform IT administrators on the best decisions to make in a scenario. However, experienced security professionals can still play a key role by fine-tuning these notifications and building automation for these tools.

Taking the Leap into AI

Last year, more than a third of global businesses were already using AI to increase productivity and decrease costs. If you have questions about using the power of AI in your business, please let us know, and we’d be happy to start the conversation!