AI Series – Part 1: AI is already in your business

AI is becoming part of everyday business life. But for many organisations, the conversations centre on hype, jargon and uncertainty. In this four part series of articles, we'll cut through the noise. We'll show where AI is already in use, its risk and how you can use AI well now.  

You don't need to be tech savvy to get ahead. We're focusing on non-technical guidance to help you make informed decisions with confidence. The series culminates in a free webinar - Demystifying AI for business - looking at the subject in depth. 

For a lot of business owners, AI feels like something they’re going to do in the future. They’re aware of the hype, but at most it’s something that big organisations are doing first before it trickles down to smaller companies. 

The truth is, it’s already embedded in more than you think and in different ways. AI is in a lot of software that your organisation uses day-to-day, things like your email, your CRM or your accounting platforms. On top of that staff are experimenting with free AI tools, using it to help with things like report writing, emails or summarising information – this scenario is going to snowball. And whether you want them too or not, staff will continue to use those tools, so having some governance around that use is essential. 

AI use in our personal lives is also growing, whether it’s for organising, learning, problem solving or as an alternative to “Googling the internet”. As with so many technologies before it, that behaviour naturally bleeds into the workplace until it becomes second nature. If you think about smartphones, messaging apps or video calls, all were adopted personally, long before they became standard business tools. AI is following that pattern. 

Helpful intentions, unmanaged risks 

Most the time, your staff will use AI for positive reasons. They’ll be trying to be more efficient, to do their job better or do it smarter. The issue isn’t really motivation or intention, rather it’s using AI without guidance or an understanding of what happens to the data being entered. 

Most free AI tools use information provided by users to improve their systems. That means business data, customers details, internal documents or spreadsheets can potentially be shared outside the organisation without your staff realising. 

At the same time, there’s a growing tendency to trust AI outputs without question. While the tools are useful for drafting and summarising, they also produce incorrect or misleading information with confidence. Without proper checking this leads to poor decisions or inaccurate information and outputs being used in the business. 

Why AI feels so normal already – and what you can do about it 

One of the reasons AI adoption feels seamless is because it’s already in familiar software – things like Alexa or social media feeds - and as such you don’t really notice it’s there. It’s kind of invisible. And so, instead of feeling like a new technology to learn, it appears as a helpful feature inside tools people already use.  

And because it looks, sounds and feels simple to use it’s easy to forget that complex data processing is happening in the background - which could in turn be unwittingly compromising your data.  

To protect your company and its data from that you need to create a clear AI policy. This MUST come before you use or invest in AI tools or projects. 

A good AI policy helps to align the expectations across teams and provides basic guardrails for responsible use. It doesn’t need to be technical or complicated, but at a minimum, it should cover: 

Alongside a policy, basic staff awareness and training are crucial. People should understand both the benefits and the risks so they can use AI sensibly rather than blindly.