You don’t want to get into development. You don’t want to get into all that stuff. Totally fine. What’s your other options?
The agency model
An option that popped up at the beginning of this AI revolution was this agency model where you hire a company or you hire a freelancer to actually go ahead and build out a system for you. And this system would be custom to your business. But at the end of the day, they drop it at your doorstep and take the money and go.
And that’s fair. And a lot of people at the beginning didn’t know how this process would work.
Software needs care after it ships
But the downside is that there’s no software on this planet that can survive after being created in a month. There’s no software on this planet that can not have bugs and not have issues with it later down the line.
Nobody’s capable of creating complex systems that are personalized to your business and then have a turnaround of one month to have it work out completely. It needs maintenance. It needs adjustments.
And so what you really want is to not hire someone to just drop code or automations at your doorstep and run because that’s where you see the big AI projects that fail.
A lot of these projects are poorly made and not maintained, or they’re made by someone who doesn’t want to do the due diligence, doesn’t want to put in the proper steps to make it maintainable, make it adjustable. And I think the biggest one is the amount of time that you need to spend babying it and adjusting it as it goes.
Buying into a platform
So let’s say you realize that messy, unmaintained software is not the way to go. You don’t want to do it yourself because you don’t have time to maintain it. What’s another option? You could buy into a platform. And there’s tons of platforms out there.
Some of these platforms are great. I’d say the really great part about them is that they’re usually actively maintained by hopefully engineers and computer scientists who know what they’re doing.
And for the most part, they’re pretty economical. You can reasonably find a huge platform, find the certain features that you want, ignore the rest, but get that whole package, bring it into your company. And I think that’s reasonable.
A platform is not personalized
The main issues I see with it are it’s not personalized whatsoever to your company. So in this company’s effort to make the platform, obviously it’s going to be very generic because it has to work for many different companies.
And so what you’ll start to find is that your automations, your reports, your custom document generation will look just like everyone else’s custom document generation who uses that platform.
Someone still has to watch the output
You’re not going to get the same personal service. Since it’s not personalized to your business, when you need service and when you need something fixed it has to happen at a grand scale.
Since AI is so new, there’s a lot of things that need babying and need like a human to review. You’re gonna have to dedicate a person to go in, baby the platform, and they’ll spend a majority of their time reviewing the output, making sure it lines up with your company and gating it at every turn.
So you’ll have to expect that you’ll need someone at your company to be looking in to the results of these platforms and what they’re giving you.
Check what they do with your data
It doesn’t apply to every platform, but always be wary of what they might do with your data. They’re going to take your data and they’re going to use it to improve their models. It’s what every technology company does.
And while that is usually fine in concept, you’ll have to see their policies and see how they actually use your data. So that’s something to consider.