If you run a business that isn't a the frontier of technology—so, most businesses—then you likely aren't so sure about all the hype around artificial intelligence, at least outside of smarter, cheaper, and more automated customer service.
Well, AI can do much more than that. You know all those back office tasks and repetitive workflows that you and your team are forced to do, but that don't take a lot of brainpower? In a few years, those tasks will be entirely automated.
Or in a few days. It's up to you.
A Primer on AI for the Skeptics and Uninitiated
First, a quick overview of what AI actually is. While artificial intelligence is a wide field, here I'm talking about a very specific type of AI: generative AI, specifically large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
LLMs are computer programs that consumed the entire internet as text, and learned how to get good at predicting the next word in a sentence. That's basically it, but scaled up to such a massive scale that their predictions are good enough to appear human, and, well, intelligent.
The most obvious application of this technology was in chatbots (since they're the perfect scenario where a user types some text and expects some reasonably intelligent text in response). But there are more use cases that take LLMs beyond the world of text prediction and let them actually do things.
Like, for example, automating away bookkeeping, record keeping, invoicing, document preparation, and other back office tasks.
AI Applications in Business: Back Office Automation
At most companies, there's a network of different tools and software used by different parts of the organization, occasionally networked together by IT departments. Dealing with all of these systems can be a pain, particularly when they need to interact with each other, and that leads to job functions that are mostly about moving data from one place to another, processing it, or doing some kind of routine task. This covers everything from invoice processing to data entry to bookkeeping to report generation. That's a lot of wasted man-hours.
How do LLMs fit into all this? Well, it turns out that in addition to being good at writing in English, LLMs are also quite good at writing code. And the simpler the code, the better they are at it. So, if you provide an LLM with a set of "functions" that it can execute, and a set of "inputs" that it can use, you can then ask it to perform all sorts of tasks across your organization.
Let's take a concrete example. Say you own an insurance agency. There's a ton of back office work that needs to be done, like:
- Processing claims
- Maintaining records
- Generating reports
- Sending out invoices
All of these tasks are repetitive, but relatively straightforward: you process claims according to a set of rules, you store all documents according to a clearly defined (digital) organization system, and so on.
LLMs can be trained to do a lot of this, and without too much effort! And it can all be done with human oversight, so you can be sure it won't do anything unexpected.
How to Get LLMs Automating Away Your Back Office
Now, the nuts and bolts. The core of the process is as follows:
- Clearly define the functions that the LLM should be able to "execute". Think like a programmer here. For the insurance example, those functions might be "Generate Invoice", "Create Report", "Classify Document", and so on. You want a fairly granular set of functions to maximize the LLM's utility.
- Connect your data sources. The LLM needs to be able to access relevant data to do its job. For example, to create a report it's going to need access to the underlying data.
- Run the LLM and process its output. Once the functions and data are defined, it's simply a matter of presenting the LLM with a prompt ("Process this invoice"), reviewing the LLM's suggested output ("1. Generate invoice 2. Send invoice 3. Categorize invoice as 'Sent'"), and then executing it.
The Easy Way: Using a Platform to Handle the Technical Bits
At Rehance, we're here to reduce the load on your IT department. We've built a platform that takes care of the AI part. Just tell us what functions (or "actions") you want to be able to execute, define your data sources, and then you can expose our text interface to your team, so they'll be able to type out what they want to do and have Rehance execute tasks across all your software systems for them. The actual execution of tasks is handled on your end, so you can be sure that nothing unexpected happens and Rehance doesn't have any access to your data or systems.
Conclusion
AI is no longer just about chatbots. It's about automating away all the repetitive tasks that make up your back office, saving money and time for your business. And it's not just for the tech giants! You can get started with this today, and it's not as hard as you might think. Your IT department can get it all set up in a few hours.
They might even thank you for it!