AI is a lot like a baby tiger. It causes excitement and interest, but not many people are asking the harder questions about who will take care of it and ensure it doesn’t hurt anyone.
If you’re wondering what the answers to some of those challenging questions are, Noelle Russell, leading AI innovator and practitioner, will dive into how lawn and landscape companies can navigate the evolving landscape of technology during her Main Stage session at ELEVATE on Nov. 5 at 2 p.m.
“My hope is that by the end, they will have an understanding that it is possible to raise a safe AI model and build a model safely and actually do good things in the world, but there is a responsibility that comes with that,” Russell says.
During her session, Russell will address some of the misconceptions surrounding AI, how they can aid landscape companies, and the next steps to successfully implementing AI.
Uses of AI
For those who are convinced AI is only useful for writing-heavy professions, Russell encourages organizations to look at the tasks they do every day.
“Most of us, especially in small to medium-sized businesses, we tend to just get so caught up in the administrivia that it is to run a business that we lose sight of what we’re doing, so we don’t even know really how we’re spending our day,” Russell says.
Examine how you spend your time and what is the most valuable use of your time. As a leader, are you spending your time on the most valuable tasks? Russell says once you’ve identified these tasks, then you can figure out the work humans shouldn’t have to do at all.
“There are a lot of mundane processes that usually humans have to do that AI is happy to take over and humans are happy to let it,” Russell says.
Russell explains that AI isn’t a job killer; it’s a task killer. It cannot completely take over a person’s job, but it can help with chores like PowerPoint creation, email triaging or answering support tickets. The key is to have clarity about what you want AI to do.
“I do think it’s really important for people to know that it is your choice, and if you are not intentional, you could actually give to an AI system the very work you love to do,” Russell says. “I always encourage people to be very specific. Figure out what you want to keep as a human, what you want to give away to a machine, and then orchestrate that relationship.”
One example she gives is how AI can help strengthen your sales pipeline by automating the communication cycle with leads. Russell says the average person needs to be contacted between five to 12 times before they make a buying decision. Rather than a person sending out these touchpoints, AI can handle this task.
“They’re not delivering the value, they’re not maintaining the customer relationship, those are very uniquely human things, but they’re just keeping the prospect warm until they’re ready to purchase with you,” Russell says.
Russell says another benefit of AI is it can serve as another grounded, well-educated voice.
“Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a symphony of talent,” Russell says. “We don’t have a bunch of different diverse perspectives, but we can actually lean on AI to help us think outside of the box that we typically think in, and that’ll help us attract more customers and get different types of clients. We can speak more languages, and it just really does open up the aperture of what business could look like in a couple of years.”
Risks and Ethical Considerations
While AI can be a great tool for handling mundane tasks, it’s critical to avoid overreliance on it. Russell says that similar to a robotic vacuum cleaner, AI can pick up bad habits from data and patterns if you don’t regularly take the time to train it.
“This is another concept that goes along with that baby tiger analogy is that it’s a lifelong endeavor,” Russell says. “Once you start leveraging AI, it’s important to know that that AI never can be left alone. A tiger can become dangerous all by itself. It’s really important that we set appropriate guardrails, but then we’re consistently monitoring those guardrails in some way.”
Another risk is trying to do too much with AI at once. Russell says it can turn into a case of trying to boil the ocean. Focusing on one specific use case can provide enough clarity to see what success looks like.
“What’s the smallest remarkable thing you can do and then how are you going to measure that you did it successfully?” Russell says. “If you do that, that puts you on a trajectory. 98% of projects are successful when they do these two things. But fun fact, 82% of projects over the last 10 years have failed because they didn’t do those two things.”
Russell says one of the ethical considerations of AI is making sure that the people you’re doing it for understand it. She says you want to have transparency and explainability. She says it’s important to understand how the AI works and where its information comes from.
“Anyone in your business should be able to look at your AI system and understand what it’s doing,” Russell says.
Russell says it’s also important for your AI model to be fair. For instance, you don’t want to accidentally infringe upon the ability of someone in the field not to understand what you built for them, just because the AI model doesn’t speak Spanish or can’t explain something in a way that that’s understandable.
“It’s up to us as the builders to make sure that we create content that’s understandable by everyone in the organization,” Russell says. “The best way to do that is to actually invite the people you’re trying to serve into the design process. Actually have them be part of the design, not just at the end, when you’re testing.”
Russell encourages creating an innovation hub within your company or an external community where people can ask questions and learn from each other how they’re leveraging AI.
Want to learn more about how to successfully implement AI in your organization? Register for ELEVATE and we’ll see you in Charlotte, North Carolina!
