From personnel management to marketing campaigns, artificial intelligence is gradually becoming part of everyday life in SMEs. The key is knowing how to use it with common sense.
Everyone is talking about it, but it is still poorly understood. Artificial intelligence intrigues, fascinates and sometimes worries people. However, it is beginning to find its place in businesses. Not to replace humans, but to help them do better. This was the focus of the webinar organised in October by Beci and CVO Semper, in three modules led by Bruno Schols, a teacher at the CVO Semper school. In just a few hours, he showed how AI can be integrated into business processes, from recruitment to sales and communication, in order to simplify certain tasks, improve data quality and free up time for teams.
‘Employees who work well with AI know when to use it... and when to do without it,’ sums up the coach. Artificial intelligence, as powerful as it is, does not think: it learns, and everything depends on what we give it to learn.
Personnel management : automation without losing purpose
Human resources is often where companies start testing AI. CV sorting tools, recruitment chatbots, automatic planning: all of these already exist. However, Bruno Schols points out: ‘the system learns by identifying patterns in the data’. If this data is biased, so will the decisions be. An example cited during the second module of the webinar illustrates the problem well: an algorithm ended up associating skin colour with professional performance, simply because it had been trained on incomplete data.
To avoid this kind of bias, it is essential to keep control over decisions. AI can sort, classify or identify trends, but it is up to humans to judge, analyse and nuance. Used properly, it can also help identify training needs or better manage careers, provided, once again, that it is based on reliable and transparent data.
Marketing and sales: from data to decision-making
In sales departments, artificial intelligence applications have multiplied: market analysis, content generation, campaign automation, prospect tracking. The tool can also help adjust pricing and supply policies. Here again, everything depends on the clarity of the request. Knowing how to formulate what is expected is becoming a skill in itself, now known as “prompt engineering”, or the ability to communicate with the machine.
Discussions between webinar participants showed that AI is already helping to schedule LinkedIn posts, convert files, analyse customer data, and more. In short, it is becoming part of everyday life in businesses of all sizes, often without us even realising it.
Tools to master
The challenge now is to regulate their use. Behind their apparent simplicity lie numerous issues: data confidentiality, environmental impact, liability in the event of errors. ‘Start small, observe, adjust,’ recommends Bruno Schols. This is sound advice for those who want to get started without getting caught up in the hype.
AI can therefore be a powerful ally, provided it is understood. This is the whole point of the webinars offered by Beci, which aim to provide Brussels-based companies with concrete guidelines: understanding the tools, measuring their limitations, and choosing those that make sense for their business.
