What AI Can’t Do for Your Small Business

While there are many tasks that artificial intelligence can perform, some jobs are best left to humans.

Experts are discovering new tasks that AI can perform every day. However, there’s limited value in using AI to take on certain business tasks — and in many instances, a human touch can significantly improve the customer experience.

As you seek to integrate AI into your business operations, keep in mind that it can’t completely replace your employees. Ultimately, AI is best deployed as a tool for automating mundane, repetitive tasks. Anything more advanced is better suited to human intervention.

Provide five-star customer service
There are parts of customer service that AI can improve. For instance, a chatbot installed on your company’s website can help answer basic questions and troubleshoot simple issues. These bots can learn over time and be set up to escalate more advanced queries to the right team member. And they can be available 24/7 to help customers navigate the website and find the information they need.
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Any time a customer concern goes beyond a bot’s training, it should immediately be routed to a live support agent.
“There’s nothing more frustrating than when a company’s only contact method is a chat box where you’re getting generic responses back that don’t apply to your situation,” wrote Crummy Media Solutions, a digital marketing company. “While you can potentially use AI for some customer service tasks, or generic emails, you also need to recognize when a process or situation requires the human touch.”

Create a marketing strategyAI can generate blog posts, write marketing emails, distribute content on social media, and even create images and videos. But it can’t ensure this content will resonate with your customers.

“​​Generating content and generating leads or sales are two very different job descriptions. And at the end of the day, whether a human or AI creates your content, you need to have a strategy in place to turn that content into results,” wrote Daniel Griggs, Founder of ATX The Brand, in Forbes.
As Griggs noted, AI can help you create content, but it doesn’t automatically create results. It’s up to your team to know your audience inside and out. Only those involved in your business on a deeper level can set goals, interact with your customers day to day, and perform quality control to ensure content is unique to your brand identity.

Human resources and hiringHiring is another area where AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as interview scheduling, skill testing, and posting open positions on different job boards. But AI can’t find the right fit for your unique business culture. It also can’t personify your employer brand and convince a candidate to accept your job offer.
Likewise, you’ll need a real person to help meet your employees’ needs. “It's kind of in the name — but your company's Human Resources department will likely always need a human at the helm to manage interpersonal conflict with the help of non-cognitive and reasoning skills,” wrote HubSpot.

Quality control​
Tools like ChatGPT and Bard can create content fast, but there are quality issues — and possible copyright infringement risks — that can damage a small business’s reputation.
It’s essential to have an editor or copywriter look over AI-generated content before releasing it to the public. AI tools sometimes include errors, bad or repetitive syntax, and poor grammar. It can also lead to questions of plagiarism if you don’t have a human review the content.
“AI doesn’t cite its sources, making it challenging to confirm whether the information it’s providing you is uniquely written, or incredibly similar to the original work that inspired it,” wrote Crummy Media Solutions.
In addition, any content generated by AI should be tailored to your unique brand voice. Only a human can ensure that your content is consistent, cohesive, and compliant.