Columnist

Confidence the key to our artificial intelligence future

The biggest barrier to artificial intelligence isn’t technology. It’s confidence.

If you’d asked me five years ago what the biggest challenge facing businesses would be, I probably wouldn’t have said artificial intelligence.

I still wouldn’t. I’d say confidence.

Over the last few months, I’ve sat with business owners from across the North East. 

They’ve built successful businesses, created jobs and weathered every challenge imaginable. 

They’ve survived recessions, the millennium bug, the financial crash of 2008, Brexit and COVID-19.

Yet many of those same business owners quietly tell me the same thing: ‘I think I’ve left it too late’.

They’re not talking about retirement; they’re talking about artificial intelligence.

One conversation really stuck with me. 

A business owner proudly showed me the spreadsheet they’d relied on for years. 

It held more than 16,000 records. It worked. Their business had grown because of it.

But every week, someone was still copying information from emails into that spreadsheet, then into another system, before creating reports by hand.

The spreadsheet wasn’t the problem. Neither was the business owner.

The problem was believing there wasn’t a better way.

That’s where I think the conversation around artificial intelligence has gone wrong.

Too many people think artificial intelligence is about creating images, writing social media posts or replacing jobs. 

But that’s not what I see when I walk into businesses across our region.

I see people who are short of time, teams drowning in administration and business owners trying to do more with fewer resources.

People don’t need another piece of software; they need someone to sit alongside them, understand how their business works and help them take the first step with confidence.

Artificial intelligence isn’t about replacing 30 years of experience; it’s about making the next 30 years a little easier.

The North East has never been afraid of hard work. We’re practical people, we solve problems and we adapt. 

That’s why I believe our businesses are in a fantastic position to benefit from artificial intelligence, not because we’ll chase every new tool, but because we’ll ask the much better question: ‘what problem are we actually trying to solve?’

Get that right and technology becomes the easy part.

The businesses that will benefit most from artificial intelligence won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets or the newest software.

They’ll be the ones confidently asking: ‘could there be a better way?’

Kaye Nicholson is founder of artificial intelligence support provider GrowthZone AI

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