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The Acceleration of Artificial Intelligence

 

Artificial intelligence is the most influential force affecting IT today. Businesses are integrating AI into all facets of business including operations, customer service, automation and IT.  At the same time, governments are racing to regulate it, while struggling to wrap their hands around it. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are investing heavily to influence the outcome. This creates a lot of opportunity and questions. Organizations must balance innovation with responsible use and compliance. Regardless if it is business or personal, AI can and is having a profound effect on our lives.

You all know how heavily we have invested in security. AI just makes that investment more critical as cyber criminals take advantage of the technology. This includes Advanced Phishing and Social Engineering, Deepfakes and Impersonation, and Information Gathering crawling public data to identify targets.

We have begun using AI to assist in speeding up the content management process for our website. This process is labor intensive and is a hindrance in allowing us to get more products and technical information published. AI has allowed us to improve that process. We’ve also begun developing an AI chat BOT to assist customers in finding the right product. We’ll continue to look at how AI can help H&S become more competitive. Like our website, AI is a tool that will allow us to compete against larger companies like Fastenal and MSC. 

While this sounds exciting, we have to tread carefully as AI is not infallible. Have you ever noticed the disclaimer at the bottom? AI tools like ChatGPT (Open AI), Claude and Gemini can make mistakes. AI responses are based on data that is given to them as well as the sources they are directed to use.

Embrace it or not, AI is here to stay.