It Really Is Possible to Save Time With AI
Tools are labor saving devices. From washing machines, dishwashers, stoves, calculators, computers, and, of course, coffee makers, we’re surrounded by gadgets whose function in our lives is to make it easier for us to get things done quickly, easily, and more effectively.
Some of these tools replace annoying or difficult physical labor (ever wash clothes by hand? Cooking over an open fire can be fun for short periods, but not something most of us would want to do every day). Calculators and computers help us with cognitive tasks, such adding up lots of numbers, word processing, document layout, and on to complex, data analysis projects. Without computers we wouldn’t be living in a science fiction world of practically instantaneous communications, including access to quantities of information undreamed of a generation ago.
It’s the quantities of information we can now access that make things just a bit tricky.
As our tools give us access to more and more information, finding the right information is getting steadily more difficult.
We’ve made it easier and easier to create, collect, and store information. As a result, when we look for information, we frequently find ourselves buried in, well, results. If the results were useful, that wouldn’t be so bad, but the more complex the question the more likely it is that the bulk of the results are worthless, wrong, or simply irrelevant. Figuring out which results are useful and which are not requires us to understand the meaning of a lot of mostly irrelevant information. For knowledge workers, that data scavenger hunt of finding and sorting through information eats up 1.5-2 hours a day—the equivalent of one full workday each week—and often leaves us frustrated and exhausted.
AI Saves Us Mental Labor
The amazing thing about AI is that it is really good at extracting meaning from information. The bad news, of course, is that AI doesn’t actually understand that meaning any more than a calculator understands the meaning of the numbers you’re adding up. Properly harnessed, however, AI’s ability to extract meaning can save us a tremendous amount of time and energy—time and energy that can be put to more productive or enjoyable uses.
The catch is, of course, that “properly harnessed” piece.
The last thing you should do is upload all your data to an AI. Why not?
To begin with, how comfortable are you with putting all your personal information in a system that you have no control over, and which could divulge anything if asked in the right way? Remember, the AI only appears to understand meaning. In reality, it’s somewhat more likely than a typical 4-year old child to blurt out something embarrassing If prompted correctly.
That problem is even worse for a business with petabytes of data. How do you feel about giving up control of the data that you use to run your business? Sure, all those AI vendors that ask you to upload your data have pretty good security, but how much do you want to bet on that? When you combine the time required to upload all your data, the challenges of keeping data synchronized (or the latency involved in doing everything with remote data), and the risks of a vendor data breach, the expenses add up. The last thing we need is a tool that costs more to use than the benefits it brings.
Properly harnessing AI means bringing AI to your data, not the other way around.
That’s where SWIRL comes in. SWIRL’s innovative approach to AI infrastructure software leaves your data safely inside your trust boundaries and brings the AI to the data. SWIRL uses AI’s ability to extract meaning from information to help you ask the right questions and then get you the right information, making AI a truly effective labor-saving tool.
SWIRL ends the data scavenger hunt and gives you back that lost day. What you do with it is up to you.
To find out how you can end your data scavenger hunt, contact SWIRL today.