Generative AI – what is it good for and how can it boost my business?

As managing director of Three Q Perms and Temps, a recruitment agency, Cora Barnes knows all about the employment market and how to find the right people for the right organisation. She’s been doing it for more than 25 years. These days she’s a dab hand at artificial intelligence too.

Earlier this year Barnes signed up to study generative artificial intelligence (GAI) for business, believing new GAI tools had the potential to speed up some of her systems and processes. She was right.

One of the biggest benefits she and her team have gained is their ability to produce more effective advertising. “It’s helping us to make our ads more visible,” she explains.

Advertising is a vital part of the business’s activities. But it’s also challenging.

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“I have to advertise jobs. It’s my bread and butter. But how many ways are there to say ‘Would you like to look at this job’?” asks Barnes. “And we are having to come up with multiple options for each ad to send across social media. You could lose the plot making it sound more interesting.”

Enter ChatGPT, the content-creating AI. Now she and her team use it to generate an array of copywriting options, including some with nursing-related puns. They also prompt it to ensure the copy reflects their values, “as a quality agency that treats people with respect,” Barnes explains. “Then we ask it to write nine versions of it.”

A human will always be required to make sure the output is suitable for a local audience – often the responses are too American.

“AI will never replace the person but it exponentially increases their output, particularly for mundane items,” says Barnes.

“For example, we can ask it to put a different voice on ads for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, a paid job board and Twitter. We might have 60 open roles so if we had to do that manually we’d be posting all day long.”

The key to success is getting the prompts right. “For example, whatever it comes up with, you can go back and ask it to rewrite it with a call to action targeting a 35-year-old female in Dublin,” she explains.

“The prompt has to be good and that’s down to the person using it. Also, the authenticity has to come from the user.”

GAI is known to suffer from ‘hallucinations’, confidently reeling off inaccuracies as if they were facts, another reason to keep a human ‘in the loop’.

As part of her training, Barnes learned about a variety of tools, including Midjourney a visual GAI you can prompt to generate high-quality images. Not all responses are useful. Once the team prompted Midjourney to provide an image of a recruiter who had just won a contract. “It gave us a cross between alien and Avatar,” she says pondering, “Maybe it has a sense of humour.”

A new report from LinkedIn entitled Future of Work, AI at Work, published in August, highlights the opportunities for business. According to its findings, 84 per cent of the platform’s US members are in jobs that could leverage GAI to automate at least a quarter of repetitive tasks and increase productivity.

“GAI is a fast-growing technology with the potential to perform tasks that, in the past, only humans could do – like writing, creating content and analysing data,” it finds.

New GAI tools present an opportunity to potentially lighten workloads for a range of professionals, it suggests. For example, by helping teachers with things such as lesson planning, curriculum development, teacher training and tutoring it could allow them to spend more time actually teaching.

For the salesperson, GAI could help with tasks such as cold calling or with retail sales and sales processes, leaving the salesperson to focus on selling. For a customer service rep, GAI could help with phone etiquette, typing, and customer support, it suggests.

Michelle Lawlor routinely uses GAI in her business, The Nude Wine Company, which she set up in 2019. It specialises in online wine sales, subscription boxes and tasting events. It’s a growing business, with both retail and corporate clients, and GAI helps not just with generating fresh ideas for events but with a growing number of internal processes too.

For example, where previously preparing a pitch for corporate business would have taken days, it now takes just 90 minutes. Lawlor, who reckons the biggest gain has been time savings, uses it to generate fresh ideas for creative events too. “I use it all the time,” she adds.

It was the prospect of her marketing manager going on maternity leave that prompted Georgia Visnyei of coffee roastery Artessa to get to grips with GAI. She signed up for an online training course through her Local Enterprise Office.

“I was in a panic about how I would manage without her so what ChatGPT did was allow us to plan together for her absence,” says Visnyei.

They used GAI both to generate great ideas and turn them into blog posts in minutes.

Coffee is Visnyei’s passion. Writing is not. “It’s not my talent,” she admits. Yet when she launched a new coffee product earlier this year she was able to use GAI to write the information for her product page, produce a newsletter and a blog post and create various social media postings, tailored to each channel. From start to finish, which included proof reading and tweaking, a task that would previously have taken her 10 days was done in two hours.

Not only does this free up Visnyei’s time to focus on growing the business, but when her marketing manager comes back from maternity leave it will free her up too.

“It means she won’t have to come to me to extract ideas for content. She will have something to work with that will make her work much more enjoyable,” says Visnyei.

It has moved on from marketing to being a lot more about business planning and data analysis

—  Maryrose Lyons, Brightspark Consulting

Digital marketing expert Maryrose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting runs online GAI training courses, including for B2B marketing. The pace at which GAI is being embedded into business practices is accelerating, she says.

“Earlier this year we were at Phase One, with switched-on early adopter business owners signing up. Very quickly after that we saw membership groups and corporates signing up. Now we are getting team leads who have come in for training saying, ‘Okay, so now that I get it; I want my team of 10 people to get it too,’” says Lyons.

Talk has moved swiftly from generating ideas and content to developing AI policy. Increasingly Lyons is helping companies assess time-consuming systems and practices across all operations to find GAI tools that can help. “It has moved on from marketing to being a lot more about business planning and data analysis,” she says.

Despite the speed of adoption, we are only at the earliest stages GAI, she says, likening it to the internet before Google or email. “There are all these tools out there. So businesses have to sift through them to find the one that works best for them,” she explains.

New ones, and new use cases, are evolving all the time. Already businesses that previously juggled with Word documents and Google Sheets now simply upload their data – “it doesn’t even have to be in the same format”, says Lyons – and ask GAI to draw out inferences.

Lyons has been running GAI courses since early this year. These days she has to pause each five week course before it ends to discuss “all the new things worth looking at that have emerged since we started,” she reveals. “It’s not digital transformation, it’s AI transformation.”