From headline-grabbing AI projects to protection against cyber criminals, hiring for the right competencies will determine which businesses win in 2023.
Whether you’re a one-person show, or part of a global enterprise with 100’s of employees, hiring for the latest tech skills will help you do business more efficiently, safely and profitably.
So, here are the 3 areas to focus your energy when it comes to developing key skills, and driving growth and innovation for your business – large or small.
1. Artificial intelligence
Without doubt, AI is the hot topic of the day when it comes to business technology.
Developing skills in AI doesn’t necessarily have to be about learning advanced computer science and how to create machine-learning algorithms from scratch.
More practically, it’s about understanding how to fit the plethora of tools and platforms that are becoming increasingly available, affordable and usable every day, to the needs of your business.
By now, most people reading this have probably heard of, and used, ChatGPT, or the new, AI-enabled version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. You may even have dabbled with tools like Dall-E 2 or Stable Diffusion to see what AI-generated art is about.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds of AI-infused tools and platforms becoming available, designed to automate and speed up leisure or business activities from bookkeeping to social media management, prospecting for leads, creating text, videos and soundtracks, or managing any kind of project.
Building AI capabilities into an organisation today is about identifying what sort of tasks can benefit from being automated and delegated to AI, and then finding the right applications and tools to get it done.
Take real estate for example. Agents can now significantly improve their efficiency by adopting generative AI. Using overwrite.ai to create property listing descriptions, means agents can focus on higher value tasks, (such as closing deals), instead of time-consuming admin.
It’s also about being able to understand and predict the way AI will impact your line of business in the future, so when even more sophisticated and powerful tools inevitably become available, you’ll be the first to put them to work and reap the rewards.
2. Data analysis
Most businesses don’t know how to use even a fraction of the data that they generate or have access to through external sources.
Those that do can use it to drive efficiency, better understand their markets and competition, and develop products and services that are more in-line with their customers’ needs.
As with AI – and this is particularly true if you are a smaller organisation – these days it doesn’t necessarily have to mean developing the hardcore technical skills that you would have needed if you’d wanted to carry out analytics 20 years ago.
Today, you can find myriad tools with friendly user-interfaces that will help you analyse your data.
All you need to do is access the data you already have to understand, for example, what demographics your products and services are popular with, what price points your customers are comfortable with, how your customer service performance impacts your customer churn, and how faults, breakages and wastage affects your bottom line.
3. Cybersecurity
It’s a sad but inescapable fact that as technology enables us to do new and amazing things, it also makes us vulnerable to new threats. The cost of cybercrime to businesses will be $8tn in 2023 and is expected to grow to £10.5t by 2025. Much of this is down to costs incurred when data is stolen – estimated at around $500 per stolen record, with the most damaging cyber thefts seeing fraudsters make off with millions of records.
Once again, there is a common misconception here – that implementing cybersecurity skills will involve hiring elite experts who will sit in a darkened room, scanning monitors for thieves attempting to breach your firewall.
In fact, the most important cybersecurity skills are those that can be taught relatively cheaply to anyone. These include safe password management practices, avoidance of malware, and awareness of attacks designed to stop letting attackers in.
The technology landscape is constantly evolving. This means it’s essential to take a strategic approach to putting the right skills in place, across the workforce. By doing this, business leaders ensure their organisations are ready to leverage the tools, platforms and trends that will help them to tackle their priorities – without being side-tracked by those that are just likely to be a distraction.
More about overwrite.ai
overwrite.ai is a Foundation Language Model. We are a pioneering themed generative AI, creating engagement-oriented content for the real estate industry. overwrite.ai creates the marketing content that powers the real estate industries of the UAE, KSA, Egypt and Lebanon.
For informative news and views on the world of real estate, proptech and AI, follow overwrite on Instagram and LinkedIn, and keep up-to-date with our weekly NewsBites blog.
overwrite.ai | real estate themed generative AI
For Full Article: https://www.raconteur.net/technology/opinion-tech-skills/