Beyond the AI buzzword
Since the beginning of the year there is an unstoppable flood of AI tools coming every week. Some are cool, some are meh, and some are absolutely breathtaking like ChatGPT or Midjourney. And there is more on the way, no doubts about it!
But beyond all these tools that are rising up, there is a lot of noise about brands integrating AI, some are even dropping everything in their roadmap just to say they have AI integrated somewhere, or how most like to say “AI driven”. And don’t get me wrong, AI is the future (a really near future), but it needs to be properly integrated into products in a way that makes sense and harness its full potential and not just to avoid doing a copy/paste from ChatGPT.
My goal with this article is to help you see through the buzzword of AI, so you can better understand which products will give you an edge in this new digital era vs which ones are just AI buzz wording.
The most common integration of AI is embedding it into existing services or products without adding any substantial value. It becomes a buzzword, a trendy accessory. For example, consider a CRM that boasts an "AI-powered" email composer to improve writing. One might argue that such functionality could be effortlessly replaced with a simple Chrome plugin or just writing the template in ChatGPT and pasting it in your CRM.
Spline is one of those that showcases another brilliant use of AI, known as 'style transfer'. This feature allows users to change the styles of their designs effortlessly, from 3D soft touch to sketches, and more. It exemplifies how AI should be utilized, not for something as elementary as text generation, but to enhance the application's core functionality. And ultimately to help and inspire creatives.
A good AI integration within a CRM system would not be just generating emails. Instead, it would involve using AI to analyze the information within the CRM, enabling automatic responses to customers based on their previous interactions. It's about crafting a personalized experience that amplifies the unique selling point of the application or service, rather than churning out generic templates.
The sad reality is, most AI integrations right now are just trying to capitalize on the hype as quickly as possible. They are sloppy and lazy add-ons that fail to add real value to a product. These brands are not just robbing their customers of a meaningful experience, but actually hurting the credibility of the AI space as a whole.
So, let's not judge AI's capabilities by those who disappoint in their integrations, but by those who are truly innovating and revolutionizing in the space. There are numerous apps like Spline and Framer proving that when harnessed correctly, AI is not merely an accessory but an enabler of innovation and growth.
Ultimately, AI integrations should enable a combination of the incredible information processing capabilities of AI, the contextual knowledge of the platform as well as human creativity. They don’t try to automate the purpose of a tool, but actually get rid of certain smaller tasks, so we can spend more time on creative work. In simple words: These tools should allow us to more effectively do what humans dream up, not dream up what humans have to do.
As more and more brands start to shine in their AI game, the more powerful implementations of this technology we will see. This leads us to a future where we can create basically anything we can dream up.
