Is your business on the AI train yet? If not, you’re likely behind your competition. Businesses of all shapes and sizes have flocked to using AI tools such as chat bots, customer service automations, content creation, analytics reporting, and more. These tools can be lifechanging for those who need to save time and cost. However, if the AI that you incorporate into your business isn’t trained or monitored properly, you can really be setting yourself up for failure. Artificial intelligence in the business world can feel like a magic switch. One solution to five problems. But turning it on and just letting it run can damage your brand image and voice, customer relationships, and set you back on your goals. AI is powerful, but without oversight, it’s unpredictable.
Defining Unmonitored – or Shadow – AI
Unmonitored AI, as we stated above, is when employees or end users use an AI tool without formal approval or oversight from someone in their company (usually the IT department). This is also referred to as Shadow AI. In other words, this is when you’re using ChatGPT or Claude to write your emails, reports, or even help answer customer inquiries when you aren’t supposed to be. It isn’t an intentionally harmful act, however, you are increasing your company’s risk for data breaches, security vulnerabilities, and overall reputation damage.
The Risks of Shadow AI
Let’s discuss to emphasize just how dangerous these ‘harmless acts’ can be. Around 2023, some Samsung employees were using ChatGPT to assist them with their work and entered some code for a project they were working on that was not public yet. They even uploaded a recording of a company meeting. All of this data leaked to the public due to ChatGPT not being a secure platform.
In California, a car dealership implemented a ChatGPT powered chat bot on their website to assist with customer service inquiries. Well, one customer was able to manipulate their untrained bot into offering them a $76,000 vehicle for just $1! Unfortunately for the customer, the dealership could not honor this once-in-a-lifetime deal.
There are so many use cases of Unmonitored AI gone wrong, but we’ll end it with this one.
Think of it This Way…
To further showcase the importance of this matter and hopefully help you understand it a bit better, let’s relate unmonitored vs monitored AI to regular vs managed hosting services. With basic hosting services, your website is just sitting on a server. It’s live, and it (probably) works, but if something breaks or your site gets hacked? It would be your responsibility to fix it.
With managed hosting, like InnoVationV provides, you always have someone monitoring performance, updates, security, and optimization. If or when issues pop up, they can usually be resolved fairly quickly. Oftentimes, issues will be resolved without you even noticing that anything happened in the first place. This oversight offers a security blanket for you and those that visit your site.
The same goes for your AI tools.
How Managed AI Can Boost Your Business
Again, businesses of all sizes can benefit from using AI tools, especially here in Augusta, Ga! When used correctly, AI can help business owners save time and money while simultaneously helping them stay competitive among similar businesses. It solves problems before they even happen and could even help guide you to make certain business decisions. We aren’t necessarily speaking of ChatGPT or Claude, but there is software out there that implements AI to help you analyze your business data, pick out common themes, compare your data to your competitors, show gaps vs advantages, and more.
If you don’t want to get that deep into it, you can also just use managed AI to do those simple, daunting tasks that you hate doing during the workday. AI can help you set calendar reminders, record and summarize your business meetings (we suggest Fathom!), assist you with writing job postings, assist with online customer service via chatbot, and so much more. The world is your oyster, but your future, with AI, is the ocean itself.
Need Help? Come InnoVate With Us
You shouldn’t have to put your business at risk just because you want to stay with the times. When you need assistance, especially with something like AI, you want to do it right. Your website, customers, and revenue are not test subjects!
At InnoVationV, we are helping businesses here in Augusta, Ga and across the nation stay five steps ahead by safely implementing AI tools into their daily routines. We can help you organize your customer data all into one place and sorting by new customers vs old. We can even create short and long term email or SMS nurture sequences to keep your customers engaged and keep you in the top of their mind. One of our most popular AI tools is a website chatbot that is 100% customizable and assists with customer service inquiries, scheduling, and more!
Interested? Give us a call at (706) 817-4220 or click the button below to book a meeting with our team. Come InnoVate with us with some managed AI!