8 Ways an MSP can help implement an AI solution

AI has some real attractions, and now that it has become so advanced, it has gained the attention of the public and the media. However, just because something is a fad, doesn’t mean that it is either new or something everyone needs. Before an organization, especially a small- to medium-sized business, initiates the use of AI in its business processes, it needs to understand that because the tool is so powerful, it also comes with some real risks. Although its predictive capabilities can be transformative for business, they can also be wrong or present legal and ethical issues. As a result, businesses should utilize the experience and skills of experts with a deep knowledge of AI and how it may be applied to your specific organizational goals.

Eight ways an MSP can help with an AI solution

AI, on its own, is a complex tool. It is also a tool that can be misapplied. Remember, the term artificial is key. To be used effectively and wisely, AI needs to be applied by someone with experience using it in your particular business. An MSP can offer the following to help you begin to integrate an AI solution into any aspect of your business.

Step one: Are there potential places where you might use AI? This is where your MSP can be of help. They understand your business and can help identify where it might assist your operations or marketing, for example.

Step two: Understand your KPIs and organizational goals, from the top down. It is obvious, but too often forgotten. What are your goals? What are the measures of success? What do you identify as the key strategies? AI needs to fit into that framework.

Step three: Narrow down a range of possible AI solutions. An MSP is going to have enough depth of knowledge of AI applications to steer you to the most appropriate ones. goals.

Step four: Estimate the solution’s ROI. Measurement matters. You need to understand the costs and ROI of each possible collusion. Just because it is trendy doesn’t mean AI makes sense in all cases. This will guide you to make the most effective use of your resources.

Step five: Ensure compliance: For example HIPAA, PCI. HITRUST. ISO27001, SOC1, SOC2. AI is a powerful and potentially intrusive tool. Compliance is critical.

Step six: Get it up and running. An MSP can implement the solution for you. Most business owners do not have the resources available for what can be a very time-intensive project.

Step seven: Manage risks. Post-implementation: AI is a sophisticated tool, and things can go wrong and need ongoing monitoring, an issue that most businesses do not have the in-house resources to address. Examples of ongoing tasks include password management, security patches, and updates, as well as monitoring response

Step eight: Ongoing evaluation for effectiveness and reliability. Remember, nothing is stagnant in business. Technologies change, the competitive environment changes. Your organization moves forward. Make sure you commit to ongoing reviews of the effectiveness of your chosen solution.

In the end, AI can be useful. But, as with any powerful tool, it can cause a lot of trouble if used by an organization without experience. Small-to-medium-sized businesses lack the in-house IT resources and depth of knowledge to implement and maintain an AI infrastructure. An MSP can bring that to the table.

Eight ways an MSP can help with an AI solution

AI, on its own, is a complex tool. It is also a tool that can be misapplied. Remember, the term artificial is key. To be used effectively and wisely, AI needs to be applied by someone with experience using it in your particular business. An MSP can offer the following to help you begin to integrate an AI solution into any aspect of your business.

Step one: Assess your organization’s potential use of AI. Basically, with the holistic understanding of your business that an MSP has, they can evaluate where there is opportunity, and prioritize where to implement first

Step two: Understand your KPIs and organizational goals, from the top down. Before you do anything, it is essential to articulate your specific goals. What do you identify as the key strategies and how will you measure your success?

Step three: Propose a possible range of AI solutions. Here is an area where your MSP can be of particular value. An MSP will be knowledgeable about the variety of applications out there and lead you to select those most appropriate for your goals.

Step four: Estimate the solution’s ROI. Remember, measurement is important. And you can not do everything. So identify each potential AI solution’s ROI. This will guide you to make the most effective use of your resources.

Step five: Ensure compliance: For example HIPAA, PCI. HITRUST. ISO27001, SOC1, SOC2. AI is a powerful and potentially intrusive tool. Compliance is critical.

Step six: Implement the solution. An MSP can implement the solution for you. Most business owners do not have the resources available for what can be a time-intensive project.

Step seven : Manage tool-related risks. This is a post-implementation issue that most businesses do not have the in-house resources to maintain long term. Examples of ongoing tasks include password management, security patches, and updates, as well as monitoring response

Step eight: Ongoing evaluation for effectiveness and reliability. Remember, nothing is stagnant in business. Technologies change, the competitive environment changes. Your organization moves forward. Make sure you commit to ongoing reviews of the effectiveness of your chosen solution.

In the end, AI can be useful. But with any powerful tool, it can cause a lot of trouble if used by an organization without experience. Small to medium sized businesses lack the in-house IT resources and depth of knowledge to implement and maintain an AI infrastructure. An MSP can bring that to the table.

AI: Marketing and other sample uses- A quick introduction

As you are likely very aware, Artificial Intelligence has become a real attention getter in the business world, as well as public media. One cannot be looking at the news everyday without coming across some article discussing AI. However, just because something is a fad, doesn’t mean that it is either new or something everyone needs. AI has been around for a long time. Anyone who has purchased something from a website is well aware of the “ others who bought “X”, have also been interested in …” feature. That feature has been around for decades. That feature is an example of AI. A simple but helpful understanding of AI is that it is able to attempt to find patterns and suggest predictions by sifting through enormous quantities of data. Quantities of data that would make seeing patterns an insurmountable human task.

Just to get a general understanding how AI is being used to meet organizational objectives, improve processes, marketing, recruiting, and even worker safety, let’s look at a few diverse examples.

Worker Safety: AI can sift through data to notice patterns of worker injury to identify safety problems in a manufacturing sector business. Simple aggregate statistics ( 5 injuries per day ) doesn’t help identify where the risks actually are, and certainly doesn’t identify key areas of risk) Where are things going wrong? Maybe patterns in time suggest worker fatigue. Maybe it identifies a certain activity that presents safety issues.

Demand Forecasting in Retail: Determining how much to stock of what item for a coming sales season can be as much an art as a quantifiable skill. As a result, companies can see real hits to the bottom line when they make a mistake. Just observing how much sold this month last year isn’t a sufficient predictor for the coming period. What about the weather? Bad economic news. Construction on a nearby road that is now finished this year. The endless factors that may influence buying decisions can be used to forecast demand more accurately.

Disease Screening in Healthcare: AI has the capacity to potentially use data to identify or eliminate certain diagnoses that an individual medical professional whose experience is necessarily finite, might be able to do. Like much else, there are ethical issues that can make AI a complex tool, but there is much potential.

Disease Tracking: The pandemic was practically an instructional video on the value of AI. Tools that could identify all of those who had likely contracted with someone who tested positive for Covid -19? That was AI at work.

Just in Time Inventory: Just in time inventory means that manufacturers avoid the costs associated with inventory that sit unused until needed. Identifying along a very long supply chain how inventory can be built and shipped to arrive just in time is no simple task. AI is a key component of that inventory model.

Customer Retention: Like other areas, you probably can collect more information about your customers than you can make sense of. So, why did they leave? You may have the answer, but it may actually be a calculus of many factors. AI can help identify all of the issues that may have led a customer to leave. Without AI, you may incorrectly attribute it to one single factor.

AI and Marketing: Why are marketers so interested?

AI has potential applications in the marketing end of any business, large or small. AI may offer you some new tools to more effectively market without expanding your present marketing resources. Marketers, in particular, may find AI useful in these three general categories-

Collecting Data about Prospective Customers– Even small businesses can collect a significant amount of data. AI can allow you to analyze that data. No matter how much data you collect, it is useless unless you can synthesize it, see patterns, etc. The human capacity to make sense of the massive amount of data we collect is limited.

Using Data to Market More Effectively– Even the most novice marketer knows that the more you know about each prospect the easier it will be to target them. The more you know their needs, the more you can explain how your product or service meets those needs. AI allows you to do more with the data you collect- to make sense of it so you can use it.

Generating the RIght Message– AI may be also able, to a certain degree, assist you in creating the messaging to reach your target. However, it is important to recognize that AI is not a silver bullet.

Marketing and AI

Suddenly, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI). It is constantly in the news now. It suddenly is looming like some intimidating Terminator. However, AI is not a toggle switch that was suddenly turned on one day this year. AI is everywhere and has been around for far longer than most of us are aware. We just didn’t realize it.

Ever think about how Instagram shows you reels based on your past views? Youtube does the same. Amazon makes recommendations based on your browsing and purchase history. By the newest standard, that is old hat AI, but it is AI. Lately, significant advances have been made that increased the power of these learning algorithms exponentially. The new tools Chat GPT, BARD, Well-said are examples very widely covered in the media.

Why are businesses so interested?

There are a wide variety of uses for AI in the business space, from project management to customer service.
A bit of background, it might be helpful to take a quick survey of places where AI is being deployed.

Before looking at examples, let’s discuss why use AI in any area at all?

Given technology, any organization has the capacity to collect–from the perspective of a human–an incomprehensibly large amount of data on almost any subject. This data can be used to do many things, but there is so much of it, we have a limited capacity to see patterns and synthesize. AI has the capacity to do that.

Three examples:

Demand forecasting in retail: Who doesn’t want the magic bullet to decide how much to stock for each season? However, just observing how much sold this month last year isn’t a sufficient predictor. What about the weather? Bad economic news. Construction on a nearby road that is now finished this year. The endless factors that may influence buying decisions can be used to forecast demand more accurately.

Disease screening in healthcare: AI has the capacity to potentially use data to identify or eliminate certain diagnoses that an individual medical professional whose experience is necessarily finite, might be able to do. Like much else, there are ethical issues that can make AI a complex tool, but there is much potential.

Customer retention: Like other areas, you probably can collect more information about your customers than you can make sense of. So, why did they leave? You may have the answer, but it may actually be a calculus of many factors. AI can help identify all of the issues that may have led a customer to leave. Without AI, you may incorrectly attribute it to one single factor.

Why are marketers so interested?

AI has potential applications in the marketing end of any business, large or small. Marketers, in particular, may find AI useful in these three general categories-

Collecting Data about prospective customers – Even small businesses can collect a significant amount of data. AI can allow you to analyze that data. No matter how much data you collect, it is useless unless you can synthesize it, see patterns, etc. The human capacity to make sense of the massive amount of data we collect is limited.

Using data to market more effectively – Even the most novice marketer knows that the more you know about each prospect the easier it will be to target them. The more you know their needs, the more you can explain how your product or service meets those needs. AI allows you to do more with the data you collect- to make sense of it so you can use it.

Generating the right message – AI may be also able, to a certain degree, assist you in creating the messaging to reach your target. However, it is important to recognize that AI is not a silver bullet.

In short, AI may offer you some new tools to more effectively market without expanding your present marketing resources.

Passwords: They seem to have been with us forever.

As we continue to suggest things you can do to protect the integrity of your company and customer data, here is a blog that covers an old level of security that we still rely on everyday. That protection is the password, so let’s talk about bedding up your employee’s handling of passwords.

Password hygiene – Passwords remain the most common everyday tool to ensure only authorized personnel have access to secure material. The issue is that passwords need maintenance and attention to be effective. Here are some common problems to avoid. And again, this requires a routine employee training program.

1. Passwords that are too simple
   Simple passwords are easy to remember but easy to crack. Words, in any language, are not ideal either. That is why many sites require a mix of letters, characters, and numbers. And yes, some people are still using Myname123.
2. One universal password
   Sometimes people find it difficult to remember multiple passwords for various files and applications, so they use a single good, strong password everywhere. This renders the good password virtually pointless and also increases the amount of damage that can be inflicted in the event that one ‘good’ password is compromised.
3. Unauthorized password sharing
   Generally done with benign intentions, employees often share passwords for convenience or to expedite handling the sharing of data. Not good.
4. Writing down passwords
   Sometimes, people follow all password best practices but find it difficult to remember complicated passwords and then write them down on a piece of paper or worse still, make a file containing all the passwords and store it in their email or computer. This is almost like giving away the keys to your property to a burglar.
5. Forgetting to change passwords to change passwords or revoke access.
   This is an issue where the staff is busy and turnover is high. Managers may fail to remember to change the passwords once a staff member quits, leaving company data vulnerable. This is especially likely in a small company where there may not be a centralized IT staff that oversees data security and access.

Remember, having a password is not sufficient. Having the right kind of password and following good password hygiene is.

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) – When a password isn’t enough, the next step to improve security is MFA. MFA layers a second authenticator (e.g. another code, picture) etc.) on top of the password requirement. The idea is that if a password is being used by someone not authorized to do so, they won’t be able to provide the second piece of information. Consumers almost always encounter it when accessing financial services sites, but MFA is becoming more common across the board. If you use a credit card at a gas station, that request for your zip code after you insert your credit card is an example of MFA.