The power and promise of AI

While businesses have been embracing artificial intelligence (AI) for decades, it’s now easier and more cost-effective than ever for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to adopt and leverage its capabilities as they scale. A broad, deep suite of AI tools allows businesses in any industry to analyze and garner insights from unprecedented volumes of data. AI can help generate original content, automate tasks, safeguard critical data, streamline the customer experience, and optimize business processes.

These are all benefits that give SMBs the competitive edge they need to excel. AI can improve business effectiveness and serve as a human aide by removing undifferentiated heavy lifting from cognitive tasks. However, without a clear strategy or business need, organizations may waste their limited time and resources with tools that aren’t secure, private, or customizable. Before implementing AI solutions, business leaders should consider their unique challenges and opportunities—a strong data foundation can assist in executing a long-term strategy. This article is a guide for business leaders interested in exploring AI solutions or integrating them into business processes. It explains how organizations of any size can benefit from this exciting technology.

Building the foundation for long-term success

The foundation of a strong AI strategy is a strong data strategy. Since the quality of your data informs relevant outcomes from your machine learning (ML) models, using high quality data to train these models is vital. Providing customers and your users with unique experiences is made possible by using customer data to train the ML model on their needs.

Because data fuels AI decision-making, businesses should securely store data in the cloud and make it accessible to AI solutions. This requires proper data storage and an actionable strategy. Many organizations have accumulated mountains of data, but may suffer from a lack of data quality, fragmented or siloed data sources, a lack of data literacy, and/or a culture that talks about data but doesn’t use it every day.

Integration requires a clean, two-way flow between systems used to store data, such as a data lake. Well-architected governance controls should also be implemented to verify that data access is appropriate for any persona using the system. Well-architected data helps SMBs move faster, innovate more effectively, and experiment with AI tools to discover how they can leverage data for the most optimal performance.

Data quality is more important than quantity, and in the case of ML, curating high-quality data for ML models is critical to achieving a high-quality output. It’s essential for businesses to collect, clean, and make the underlying data driving AI models more accessible. More than half of the time spent “doing AI” or gaining value from data is spent on mundane processes such as data acquisition and wrangling.

Appointing data stewards or improving data quality at its source can help, but foundational elements are equally critical. Having a cost-effective, highly scalable data lake is a good starting point, as is increasing data literacy and data accessibility organization wide

SMB leaders can create this foundation by adding data engineers and data scientists to their organization. Alternatively, they can leverage the expertise of IT partners that offer consulting services and specialize in data and AI competencies. These partners can recommend and help implement smart data strategies, setting up an IT foundation for long-term success. They can also help SMBs manage their AI services and offer cost optimization recommendations.

Establishing this foundation means focusing primarily on making data available and providing access to individual functions and lines of business.

This process is also an opportunity to upskill entire SMB teams. Creating processes for securing and sharing data, as well as developing necessary critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, will become even more vital moving forward. Whether a company manages its own in-house IT resources or relies on IT partners, every organization wanting to maximize AI capabilities should establish a solid data foundation.

Learn how to gain greater visibility into your business data as it grows.

Ways SMBs can apply AI to their business

With the right foundation in place, businesses of any size can experience new growth and innovation. AI tools can be used to:

Enhance customer experiences

SMBs can integrate intelligent chat and voice bots into contact centers, analyzing interactions and transactions to make improvements and service recommendations. This helps create personalized web experiences tailored to customer preferences and behaviors.

Boost employee productivity and automate business processes

With swift, efficient automated document processing, businesses can easily summarize and analyze information from a vast range of sources and consolidate them into easily digestible reports. AI solutions from AWS, including AWS Intelligent Document Processing— which can read, understand, and analyze documents—provide turnkey solutions that can help lower costs or boost engagement.

Enhance creativity and content creation

AI can generate multiple design prototypes based on certain inputs and constraints. It can also optimize existing designs based on user feedback, thereby increasing production speed. Marketers can use AI to generate written content such as blog posts, social media posts, and emails. Media companies can use it to create graphics, special effects, scripts, dialogues, and stories for multiple formats.

The AWS approach to responsible AI use

In the 20+ years of working within AI frameworks, AWS has considered the challenges in defining, measuring, and mitigating concerns about fairness, toxicity, and intellectual property, among others. Learn more about the AWS approach to responsible AI use.

SMBs should consider the responsibilities associated with implementing AI.

Legal liability

SMBs leveraging generative AI for content development will want to stay informed on what will likely be an evolving set of legal parameters relating to copyright infringement and intellectual property. They need to be sure they aren’t using generated content that closely resembles that of another creator, while protecting their own original content or data from being used to train other AI tools. A responsible and experienced provider can help SMBs navigate associated legal and regulatory issues.

Trustworthiness

Language models can create persuasive, eloquent, and brand-specific content for SMBs, but it isn’t always verified by a trustworthy source, and can still contain inaccuracies or misinterpretable information. Like any content that an SMB creates or uses, it’s wise to independently assess its accuracy and message before distributing.

Governance

Responsible AI governance involves teams across different functions, including leadership, data science, and legal. AWS offers innovative tools and capabilities that customers can use at all stages of the AI/ML life cycle—helping you take a comprehensive, cohesive approach to building, training, and operating systems responsibly.

Why SMBs choose AWS when implementing AI solutions

The AWS approach is to democratize access to AI, making the technology available to businesses of all sizes. With AWS, SMBs can discover the IT solutions that best fit their unique needs, as well as how to use them to build and scale their business. There are a few key reasons why SMB customers choose AWS when implementing AI solutions and building a long-term strategy:

Reasons to choose AWS

Discover the IT solutions that best fit your needs.

Depth and breadth of experience

With more than 20+ years of experience building AI architecture, AWS is committed to responsible, sustainable solutions that reduce risk for customers. AWS offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions, ranging from ready-made, purpose-built AI services to build-your-own models with Amazon SageMaker.

A high level of cloud security

AWS ensures that the data fueling AI solutions belongs to customers and isn’t used to train models that can be used by anyone else. AWS security infrastructure is built to satisfy the highest requirements of the world’s leading financial, educational, and governmental institutions, which means businesses of any size benefit from the same high level of protection.

Support through best-in-class resources

With AWS, customers can implement solutions to address business use cases and train teams on how to manage, identify, and build the right models for businesses of any size.