AI has popped into our everyday lives, and sometimes we end up using it by accident. Unless you’ve made a concerted effort to explore it, you’re probably either putting it on the back-burner or trying to outright avoid it.

Laura McCarroll and Sarah Stidham, co-owners of Saint and Siren Marketing Co. in Jim Thorpe, have made a business out of consulting other businesses on how to use artificial intelligence to improve their businesses.

They presented “AI Made Simple: Practical Tools for Small Business Success” at a Lunch and Learn workshop on Oct. 2 at the Carbon Chamber & Economic Development Corporation offices in Lehighton.

“AI is a tool to support humans, not replace. AI is not in charge. You are in charge,” McCarroll said.

AI should be thought of as an assistant, she said. It can help expedite tasks, so employees can make better use of their time.

Most employees spend 30% to 50% of their day on repetitive tasks, such as responding to email, scheduling and data entry, Stidham said.

“Instead of spending hours on repetitive work, your employees get to focus on customer relationships, strategy, problem solving and creating art. Things they are passionate about. It’s about shifting from busy work to meaningful work,” Stidham said.

Some of the things AI can do is compile data from a photograph. For instance, it can compile the contact information from a picture of multiple business cards into a spreadsheet.

It can also take the information from a picture of handwritten notes from a meeting and create priority lists, action items and more.

McCarroll said she likes to use Open AI’s ChatGPT for this.

AI also can help a business figure out what it needs in inventory by analyzing sales data to generate a report on the top products, and related information.

“People have this misconception that its scary or its complex, and we’re here to tell you it’s not. It’s really easy,” McCarroll said.

Researching

Brainstorming is her favorite use of AI, because it can create leads from the prompts.

“Lead generation is huge,” McCarroll said, and had some tips for better researching.

Give the AI app very specific questions — also called prompts — when searching for information. Don’t be general. General information can give a broad answer.

AI is designed to pull information from anywhere on the internet that is publicly available. Some information is correct, and some is not, so be careful. McCarroll recommends double checking the information.

AI also is designed to learn the preferences of the person who is asking it questions, so it will eventually give answers the person wants.

“It will recommend things because when you’re using Chat, it wants to learn you, so it is biased,” McCarroll said.

She warns that it is important to stay on task when using AI; don’t get pulled into tangent topics that can lead to wasted time.

Types of apps

There are a variety of AI apps available. Some are free; some are not.

McCarroll said she often uses ChatGPT because it is the broadest, easiest, most trusted tool to use. There are many others and some that are geared toward specific functions.

Otter is a good app for transcribing notes, McCarroll said. With sales and marketing, Hubspot, ChatGPT, Copy. AI, Claude and Canva are good apps. She also mentioned Jasper, Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, Outcomes, VISME and Fireflies.

McCarroll said Perplexity is good for deep research. Canva is great for projects that need graphics. Outcome uses trustworthy sources in gathering its information. VISME is helpful in putting together a presentation, but it is a pay app, and Fireflies is best for summarizing notes from team meetings into a plan of action.

“Find the app that works for you,” McCarroll said.

She recommends finding one that does most of what needs done instead of jumping around from one app to another.