When Jamie Shepherd started Spice Cat Hot Sauce in March, she decided not only to invest in hot sauces but also in taking time to learn artificial intelligence.
The new technology was a big help in creating a website for her Columbia-based e-commerce business, Shepherd said.
Shepherd held “conversations” with ChatGPT and instructed the generative AI chatbot to help her name her hot sauces based on descriptions she provided. She then picked from a variety of name options. Shepherd also used ChatGPT to write descriptions of her sauces, which she said went directly to her website.
“It’s almost like having an administrative assistant where you say, ‘Go get me this data,’” Shepherd said.
Shepherd is not the only business owner in the state utilizing AI for her operations.
The percentage of Missouri businesses that reported using AI nearly doubled from 3.1% in May 2023 to 6.1% one year later, according to a recent brief from University of Missouri Extension.
Alan Spell, one of the brief’s authors, said these Missouri businesses range in size, from entrepreneurs like Shepherd to larger firms focused on delivering AI services.
In the coming years, he expects these big companies to help small businesses use AI.
“(Large AI firms) may have AI-assisted data and analytics for you, and so you're able to use it, but not have to actually know how to use AI yourself,” Spell said.
AI services for small businesses
One local company delivering AI services to businesses is Keyhole Software, a software consulting and development company based in the Kansas City area. Zach Gardner, the chief architect at the company, said his clients commonly use ChatGPT because it synthesizes large amounts of information and is easily accessible.
“The less that they have to customize, the more time that they can spend doing what it is that they do well,” Gardner said. “ChatGPT is just kind of where we typically steer everyone towards.”
Marketing tools and chatbot assistance are among top AI uses in business, according to the MU Extension brief. But Missouri businesses are embracing other uses of the technology.
Jim Starcev, the innovation program manager at KC Digital Drive, a nonprofit organization providing technology resources, said sentiment analysis can be used for businesses such as coffee shops, helping them detect emotional tone in bodies of text.
“If you want to see what's happening on Yelp, you can use AI to consolidate and pull in if you choose to respond to negative reviews,” Starcev said.
This can be beneficial for customer service and is a tool Starcev mentions to coffee shop owners — a target audience he says has been very receptive to using AI.
Dale Thomas founded Actionable Ops, an AI implementation firm, and wrote a book about AI use in business. He said small businesses benefit from AI tools that can perform tasks on behalf of someone, such as monitoring and responding to emails.
“You can have AI doing everything from answering the phone when they're too busy or just answering the phone in general, to handling those customer calls, to taking orders over the phone,” Thomas said.
Privacy and regulation
As some businesses embrace AI, others are taking precautions.
Scott Christianson, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Missouri's college of business, said he’s known businesses that code their websites to block ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview from summarizing the content on their webpages. Information summarized by generative AI tools can be false and prevent customers from visiting a business’s website, he said.
Businesses also block ChatGPT to prevent their competitors from conducting comparative analysis of their website, Christianson said. Some businesses may ask ChatGPT to synthesize information on a competitor’s website and compare it to their own.
“I think in Missouri that we have a lot of businesses that are experimenting with it,” Christianson said, “that are trying to understand what some of the risks are.”
Starcev also said entrepreneurs should be cautious about using generative AI content verbatim, specifically when it comes to copywriting.
“Anything created by AI right now is not your intellectual property, basically,” Starcev said. "No way to protect it.”
President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI regulation last year, but it does not specifically state what types of data AI is allowed to access within the U.S.
Spell said he is expecting to see growth in IT firms serving businesses that want to protect themselves from data encroachment.
AI in the long run
Since ChatGPT was released two years ago, its usage has skyrocketed. The software had over 180 million users as of September, according to OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT.
Despite the growth of generative AI, connoisseurs seem to agree the hype will calm down.
Spell said he expects the growth of AI to continue over this next year but to hit an even level in the next couple of years.
“I just think that the uses that can be very dynamic and change the way our companies are structured — like using less people in customer service, for example — those things are going to happen, but they're not going to happen right away,” Spell said.
Gardner expects the same.
“I think that we're hitting sort of the end of the hype cycle with generative AI,” he said.
For Shepherd, who is looking to grow her hot sauce company, artificial intelligence is just another part of her operation.
“It's not going away,” Shepherd said. “Technology doesn’t go away. It’s better to just embrace it.”
