'AI has arrived... and is destined to revolutionise world of work'

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us whether we are aware of it or not.

Whether it's Netflix serving you the next film based on your preferences, the weather report or the autopilot facility from Tesla. All of these are using AI, and over the next one or two years, we are going to see huge advances in the technology.

In this column I’m going to attempt to demystify what AI is and how you can start to get the best out of it.

Before I do that, it's important to understand how AI will affect the world of work. There  is a great report online that outlines how different sectors of businesses are likely to use AI over the next two years. You can find it at: https://blog.whitehat-seo.co.uk/the-24-month-ai-advantage-2025-2026 

70 per cent of AI adopters see an increase in revenue (Google).

28 per cent of AI adopters see cost reductions (Google).

It is expected that 45 per cent of all the jobs that people do now will not be there in 10 years’ time. Some of this will be to do with AI.

AI-empowered employees are 50 times more productive than non-empowered ones.

Mindvalley is an early adopter of AI tools and has managed to reduce its current workforce from 400 to 270 just by not recruiting and encouraging staff to use AI tools.

AI cannot pick out cancer cells from a CT scan but it can perform many low-level, repetitive tasks.

However, there are some skills required to work with AI and at the minute, businesses don’t really know in terms of how to use AI.

Essentially, it does mean that you can do better work than you did before much quicker.

If we look at generative AI, this is billions of instructions at once, and no human can think like this, and it's really more algorithmic intelligence, so it's different from human intelligence.

This is quite different from how Google works. When you do a Google search, it is doing a “deterministic” database query. So, what this means is that you get the same answer each time.

So, if 20 of your friends did a Google search with the same word, then Google would bring you back exactly the same information to everyone.

But with AI, this is quite different. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are non-deterministic. So, what they're doing is they are guessing the answer, and it's a pattern matcher. So, it gives a good answer, but it's not necessarily the right answer, which is why it is different from Google.

The same goes with your 20 friends. If you all ask the same question of ChatGPT at the same time, then you will get 20 different or similar answers, because it is making a guess at the information that you want.

What is less useful is the fact that it will not give right or wrong answers, so this is where the human element comes in. Humans are needed to check the information that has been supplied.

What you have to be really aware of is that it's very easy to turn your brain off whilst you're using these tools.

ChatGPT will allow you to create a free account which will give you access try out the AI chatbot. The recommendation is to test its knowledge with a subject area that you know well and then spread to areas that you know less well.

A really good website is 

Theresanaiforthat.com. Here you will see many custom GPTs written up.

AI is always hallucinating, and this is a great weakness. So, AI makes mistakes.

So, in terms of relating to the AI, you do have to think first: what does a good answer look like? Is it helpful? Is the output any good? Again, adding your thoughts to the output from the AI will get you a better answer.

You should always fact-check an AI answer and check links and sources. Do your due diligence before you use your AI content anywhere and be cautious about putting personal information into AI.

You can communicate in English, but better, more concise English will get a better answer for you from the AI. One sentence will not really help.

So, if you have a large prompt (like a written brief) with a lot of inputs (or extra documents), then you're going to get a much better answer out of the AI.

Start to think about English as a programming language.