Can you use AI Safely in your business? There is a lot of buzz right now about AI. Media outlets tell us AI is a runaway train and we need safeguards. And yet, everywhere we look AI is implemented
If you have trust issues with AI, you’re not alone. NAB have surveyed SME’s in Australia and discovered 42-44% of small business owners are not using AI in their business.
Have you heard the slogan, ‘AI will not take your job, but someone who knows how to use it, will’?
What once may have taken 2 hours to compile a spreadsheet or presentation, can now take 20 minutes. Let’s look at three main parts to this discussion:
- How is AI already operating in your business?
- What can you do with AI in your business to save time?
- How can you apply these safely? What is the Risk?
1. How is AI Already Operating in Your Business?
You may be surprised to know that you already use a lot of AI in your everyday life. Every time you go to google and do a websearch, it opens up a chatbot called Google Gemini and uses AI to find the information you require. Once we were presented with a list of relevant websites, now we have the opportunity to converse with the chatbot on google and refine our request.
Our accounting systems are continually incorporating AI into their functionality. You can upload a bill and AI will read the contents and create the template. Using Dext or Receipt Bank or Hubdoc uses AI.
Go to a website, and click on the chatbot to find the answer to your question. Chances are, AI will search the answer and respond for you.
Even telephone customer service queues use AI to direct your call.
Even the supermarket checkout uses AI. Ever wondered how it knows you have placed bananas on the scale?
Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. Almost everything we do will have an AI fingerprint in the future. Let’s figure out how to use it.
2. How Can You Use AI in Your Business to Save Time?
Writing Articles & Emails
Believe it or not, this article has not been generated by AI. But can you tell? How would you know if I asked AI to write the article or if I simply wrote this article and asked AI to clean it up? Chances are, unless there are a lot of images, you would not presume AI has been involved.
This was deliberate but so you know, I write all my articles and then send them to AI for its input. The AI chat we use is Claude AI. If I copy and paste the written work into Claude, it will find any spelling and grammatical errors, and also fix up my idea presentation. It won’t change the article. but will look at what I’m trying to say and do a better job. I can simply copy and paste the finished work into my article. The whole process can take 5 minutes.
Lets apply this to emails. You can ask AI to generate an email to express what you want to say, or you can write the email and ask AI to clean it up. Either way, copy and paste the results into your email. This can save you a lot of time and potential issues as AI will advise you of any errors.
There is another advantage to asking AI to help you with articles and Emails: You can ask the AI chatbot to check your content against a set of parameters. For example: If I write an article about PayDay Super, I can ask Claude to check that the content lines up with ATO released information. I can ask Claude to verify if the information presented is legal etc. saving me potentially costly information errors.
Creating Presentations
Microsoft Powerpoint has been our presentation go to for so long. Have you considered taking your Powerpoint presentation, giving it to AI and asking it to enhance the optics, update the presentation and improve its layout and content?
You can also create a word document, give it to AI, ask it to re-format into a powerpoint presentation into slides and fix up the content.
This can save you hours of work. The ideas are yours. The content is yours. There is no AI content. However, the layout, presentation, punctuation, grammar etc. have all been corrected by AI.
Saving hours of time on presentations, articles, emails, ads, letters etc. will give you precious time to put back into the business
Dissecting and Interpreting Financial Data
If you have a Profit and Loss Statement, you can present AI with the data and ask it to interpret this for you. It can easily tell you what your gross profit percentage was per month, per year, per unit if you give it the number of units.
Some basic questions you can ask AI with your financial data:
- How can I improve the net profit?
- Are the wages at an acceptable percentage of revenue? I have x employees
- If I were to hire another employee at $X per year, what would the net profit look like?
- If I were to add 5% to my invoices, what would the annual GP percentage become?
There are many more but you can see that AI can pull out a lot of data and give some very good answers. Be careful here: AI can provide some convincing answers, but that doesn’t mean they are correct. It will give reasons and often ask questions to refine the answer. You must double check the results. The best way to do this would be to ask a trusted advisor to verify the results before you make any financial decisions.
AI cannot take the place of financial advice as it only has the information you provide. There may be core information missing from the presentation that your advisor has. However, you can use AI to graphically represent your data too which can also help.
When presenting financial information, apply the steps outlined below to keep your information private.
3. How Can You Use AI Safely?
The biggest reason people won’t use AI is the risk factor. Not knowing how to mitigate risk of privacy means they just won’t use it.
Here are some very good tips to protect your privacy and use AI safely. These recommendations are for people that value privacy highly and want to protect it at all costs. None of these recommendations assume AI is unsafe.
- Always use a paid AI Subscription
Free AI versions like Free ChatGPT, Grok etc. use their AI chatbots to train their models. This means, your data is stored, saved and used for training. It can be used by third parties and does not keep your privacy and information safe. We recommend always using a paid subscription. In the settings, turn off the feature that allows your data to be used to train the AI models.
- Don’t connect AI models to your software unless you are willing to share data
You don’t have to connect the AI model to your software. You can input the info that you want into AI rather than have it link to the software and scan when you need it. I’m not saying that it is unsafe to link AI to your software, but if you want to be sure and protect your privacy, this is not necessary. Some software will automatically link to AI but you can also turn off these features. eg. Xero has started using an AI bot called JAX within the accounting software. You don’t need to use this unless you are comfortable. You can switch off this functionality.
- Never provide personal info
As a finance advisor, we have to be very careful with our client’s data and do not expose their data to AI without consent. The way we do this and still use AI if needed is to remove any identifying factors and present anonymous data. We can screenshot the numbers and remove the client name, our name etc.
Sometimes, AI can find errors we can’t see, or save us time in reconciling a list of numbers against a statement. We never give AI free reign to our accounting software or the software of our clients and ask it to provide reports or information. To do this requires potentially compromising the privacy of the file.
Sometimes, we present names as code to avoid breaching privacy.
You provide as much information as you are comfortable with. There is no set rule here. Some people are very happy to link AI to their software and have it interrogate all their data when they need it. Some are reluctant to share too much.
Its great to know that you can still use AI and benefit from its features without compromising your privacy and security
- Never Trust what AI gives you is truth – ask for evidence
AI answers are highly convincing. They sound better than legislation often. Many times the answer is incorrect. If AI gives you an incorrect answer, you can tell it the answer is wrong and it will agree!
The best question is one that asks AI to point to the legislation source and article in its answer. Then go and check the source. Make sure the source is reputable. For example: If you were to ask AI about rules for Payday Super it can source any websites on the internet for information. A blog writer may have published incorrect data but it doesn’t matter to the AI. It can reproduce this data for you as fact. AI doesn’t currently check how many websites are in agreement for its answer and give you the most popular answer, it just finds and answer based on its algorithm.
Instead, you can phrase a question like this: ‘What happens if super is paid late under payday super? Give me the ATO link to the answer’. Don’t just accept the answer because there is a link. Click on the link and verify it.
What are the Risks?
Using AI irresponsibly can place your data out into the internet and make it available for third parties. The risk here is that data is valuable, particularly for hackers. Email data is particularly sensitive. If you give AI access to your emails, you could be risking not only your data, but the data of others getting hacked.
Be mindful of what AI can do and where your data is stored. If AI chatbots build a profile of you based on your questions, are you OK with that? What can it do with this data? Who can access it? These questions are particularly relevant if you use free bots.
At this point the full spectrum of risk is not known. It is wise to be conservative now as AI is changing every day and becoming more sophisticated.
I recommend finding a way to use AI safely so you don’t get left behind. In falling behind and not understanding AI and its risks, you become a target for breach of privacy.
Get out there and use AI. Let it help you in business stay ahead of the game. Be careful of its accuracy and always check your financial data with a trusted advisor before making big decisions.
