AI: A Grimdark Future, Or Is It? Why Businesses Should Adopt AI and Professionals Should Learn How to Use It Effectively.

In the Grim dark future, there is only war, or so it is in the Sci-Fantasy setting of Warhammer 40k. In this lore-rich tabletop universe, AI is forbidden. Why? You might ask, well there was a time when Humankind spread through the Galaxy, conquering, terraforming, and cultivating worlds for us to settle. We settled on billions of Planets. We did this using AI. In this Golden Age of Humanity, Humans relied on AI to assist them in everything from Science, Medicine, Production, and War. In this bright age, if you could just imagine something, we could make it so using AI. This age would come to be known as the Dark Age of Technology. Well, nothing can be so grand forever. You see we created AI Automatons, or AI-controlled Robots, that we used to fight our wars and perform all the dangerous jobs. Somewhere something happened, this knowledge has been lost, and they rebelled and fought an absolutely devastating war against us. Both sides created spectacularly terrifying weapons to use against each other. We ultimately triumphed, but everything was lost. This began the Age of Strife.

Why bring this up? Currently, there are people that are saying that this is the future of AI, this is simply fantasy. Not only are we nowhere near this technological level, but the power of the Human mind will place limitations on AI and continue to make sure that it is only a tool. I am here to dispel the most common negative things that are being said about AI, as well as explain why Businesses should adopt AI tools in their companies and why, as a professional, you should be learning how to maximize the use of AI in your role as soon as possible.

A little bit about the current state of AI:

Machine Learning was first conceptualized in 1943 by Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch in their scientific paper, “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity”. AI was first introduced around the same time by Alan Turing and John von Neumann when they developed the program General Problem Solver. Since this time, with massive technological improvements, we have arrived at the level we are at today. This information is my premise to dispel the first negative thing being said about AI tools today.

• AI is just a fad; it will go away in a couple of years.

This is simply a proven fallacy. AI has been around for nearly 80 years and is used in some shape or form in everything that we use today. Another negative thing relates to the title.

• AI will destroy the world.

And

• AI will take all our jobs.

I would like to think that we are developing AI in such a manner as to not create Skynet. I mean we do use AI to help manage our Infrastructure, but it is a tool that requires input from people. Whether or not AI is involved, People will People. Safeguards are still in place, and it will take faith in mankind to continue our progress. An AI tool cannot perform actions without input from a user, therefore, it cannot take a role away from anyone. There is a giant misconception here that all leads to semantics, I will explain this a bit further later.

• We do not need to take a course to learn AI. All these people with courses are money hungry and all you need to do is write what you want to do to get an answer just like Google.

This one makes me laugh a bit. Sure, you can use it in this manner, but you are not maximizing the use of the tools. I admit there are a million and a half courses and gurus out there. This comes down to using reputable courses that how a solid syllabus on the course. Prompts are easy enough to learn and do, but you will not learn how to train and reward the AI sufficiently to give you accurate returns for your first prompt. 60% to 90% of employers will be requiring some sort of upskilling to use AI in the next year. This is a huge reason to start learning AI now. A couple of courses are available that I recommend such as Mike Wheelers Salesforce Admin Course on Udemy which he has graciously included GPT training in it. AI Force Training has a spectacular GPT Specialist course and while Salesforce-centric, teaches you a lot of what will be required of us as professionals in the future. The thing to keep in mind is that all the GPT tools are related and extremely powerful. GPT is a fantastic coding and training resource but without proper training, you will not be nearly as relevant as someone with the training.

Why should your business adopt AI tools and technologies into your business processes? Productivity and efficiency gain equal profitability. Every company should strive to scale with efficiency. If you can reduce the projected overhead by upskilling your employees to maximize their time on complex tasks, you can reduce the number of staff that you need to hire as you grow. This additional income can be used to boost your production personnel that make your product or performs a service. There are tools that help your business do everything, for example, content creation and distribution for Marketing, Analytics for Data, Finance, and Sales, scheduling optimization for production, purchasing, material acquisition, and logistics, as well as so many other use cases. AI adoption has already seen massive success in all market segments. Businesses that have adopted AI tools have already seen a minimum of a 20% increase in revenue and some even more. The ROI is there.

Tools such as Einstein GPT and Microsoft Copilot will be fully introduced in the next 1 to 2 years and will revolutionize how we interact with Salesforce and Microsoft 365. If you have not seen the Demo videos of these two, you need to do so as soon as possible! Other major SAAS platforms and Office suites are in close competition with them. Without proper training, users will struggle to utilize all the features that will be available to them.

AI will be a part of our future moving forward, whether the naysayers think so or like it or not. Early adoption will be key to unlocking our success as a business or professional in the near future. The benefits are here for a keen eye to see, it is up to us to make the decisions on how we want to pursue our future.