Business Investment in AI: Experts discuss the benefits and pitfalls

Many businesses are still cautious when it comes to investing funds into AI integration, with three in five executives holding back on AI investment, however, contrasting reports highlight that over 82% of companies are either using or exploring the use of AI in 2024.

RELATED: Overcoming the AI adoption chasm

But what do businesses have to remain mindful of when adopting AI in the workplace, and is it really better than human error? Application security SaaS company Indusface have analysed the pros and cons of utilising artificial intelligence, and whether it is worth your business investing in the tool.

What advantages can AI bring to a business?

1. Ability to improve customer support and analyze consumer data

AI tools can contribute to a corporation’s understanding of their customers and make it easier to analyze consumer data. Ultimately, this can help your business to understand the target market’s preferences and ensure your products and services match with such needs.

Based on its consumer knowledge, AI can create a specific approach for each customer, strengthening the relevance of communications and products/services offered by a business, which in turn, generates a more personal relationship between your business and customers.

2. Streamline operations and increase speed at which things can get done

From supply chain to HR management, tasks that would previously have required human effort are now being made increasingly more efficient by AI.

Businesses can automate routine day-to-day tasks and processes by incorporating ChatGPT into their workflows, allowing the chatbot to handle repetitive inquiries, freeing up human resources for more complex tasks. For example, AI can help front end-facing support agents to get queries driven by the Large Language Models, providing data at their fingertips to solve customer queries while being on a call.

For data driven analysis, AI can identify outliers and present to humans to provide more context based analysis on what is causing this, which saves a lot of time in data crunching and identifying outliers.

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3. Assistance in cyber security

With the ever-growing and changing methods used by cyber criminals, it can be hard to stay on top of the various kinds of attacks, as well as spotting new ones. However, AI security tools can detect a large variation of attacks, which can help businesses prevent falling victim to cyber attacks.

AI tools can have the ability to analyze large amounts of data and identify suspicious activity and potential cyber attacks, as well as those that may be unknown. By utilizing and training AI models on how employees use it, AI can detect suspicious patterns of behavior which can help identify whether the business may be under attempted attack.

What are the disadvantages of using AI within a business?

1. Varied degrees of accuracy

As a business, the last thing you need are clients and customers becoming frustrated by the communications they receive, and with ChatGPT lacking the ability to understand human emotion and empathize, this unfortunately may be the case.

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If a business lacks adequate AI inspection from internal employees, this could result in AI making decisions without sufficient human oversight, which leads to poor consumer experiences, and potential legal liabilities.Therefore, businesses must ensure that they have a knowledgeable team of workers who can oversee the responses and results AI is generating for consumers.

2. Biased results and harming consumer trust

Since AI tools generate responses based on data which they are trained on, it can produce answers which should really be ignored or avoided for ethical or legal reasons. Businesses have an ethical duty to remove algorithmic biases and value humans first and foremost, and in order to execute this corporate responsibility, they need to be aware of AI output, and where to ignore its assistance.

If businesses are seen or found to be exploring biased opinions or tools, they could face losing customers, consumer trust, and ultimately revenue. It is important however, for businesses not to completely distrust or stray away from any AI use, especially in an era of AI growth. Instead, they should perhaps look at training employees in the workforce on using AI in an ethical and suitable way, whilst also implementing policies on the data within the AI model.

3. Privacy and security concerns / risks

If a business relies heavily on their AI system, although it may aid in streamlining operations, it also leaves them open to risks of a cyber attack, as it is likely to hold a wealth of crucial business information, from private consumer data, to financial data on the business itself.

If a cyber criminal manages to modify the bot’s data, this can result in unexpected, inappropriate, or malicious consequences for consumers and the business. Hackers could also end up acquiring highly sensitive business and consumer information, which could result in loss of reputation, and ultimately revenue.

Venky Sundar, Founder and President of Indusface provides expert commentary on behalf of Indusface, on the benefits and risks of using AI for businesses, as well as cybersecurity implications:

“Application of AI for application security is fairly straightforward. AI is really good at finding anomalies in the way an application is used. These anomalies could then be scored for maliciousness and business risk to immediately block attacks. In fact, many advanced WAAPs like AppTrana already do this.

“The main concern of using AI for a business, especially in the age of SaaS and IT, is when businesses use it for coding their applications and ship vulnerable products. Hackers also have access to AI and the bar is getting lower to probe for vulnerabilities and run targeted exploit attempts.

“In order to secure AI systems to make them as cyber-safe as possible, the age-old wisdom of inventorying your external attack surface, scanning this for vulnerabilities, patching all open vulnerabilities and deploying an edge security solution to protect against common attacks, still holds good. If anything, AI has only added sophistication to this toolset and it improves the efficiency of all of the above.”

Credit:  https://www.indusface.com/

Methodology:

1. Indusface sought to analyze and explore whether the reliance of AI in business is really better than human error.

2. To do this, they carried out thorough research across multiple reputable websites such as www.insightsforprofessionals.com, and forbes.com.

3. Expert commentary was then provided by the experts at Indusface, on the risks and benefits of AI, as well as impacts on cybersecurity.

4. Data and research was conducted July 2024, and is accurate as of then.