Small businesses no longer have a binary choice in front of them on whether to use generative AI. The technology can now be found within software packages, handling small tasks in the background or being directly enlisted by employees to take care of busy work.
The prevalence of GenAI has done little to diminish employees’ fears, according to a new study, “Data Privacy and Generative AI Usage,” conducted by Zoho and CRM Essentials. The report surveyed 1,000 US employees working across diverse industries, company sizes, and job titles to determine how often they were using GenAI, its use cases, and, most importantly, how employees feel about sharing personal and company data with GenAI for training purposes.
The results demonstrated that fear of GenAI remains across all employees, even if use of the technology is inevitable or it has already been implemented at the company level. However, by drawing lessons from these results, small businesses can implement a successful GenAI launch within their organization—one that reduces employee stress and enables them to focus on the higher-profile tasks so critical to SMBs.
Feelings about GenAI
All employees surveyed in “Data Privacy and Generative AI Usage,” not just daily users, expressed high degrees of concern about the technology: 46% said they believed AI was a threat to their job, and 26% said it was a “necessary evil.” Additionally, 74% of respondents claimed government legislation was needed for training AI with employee data, and 75% wanted legislation to regulate IP rights for AI content creation.
Yet, employees admitted that GenAI has provided numerous benefits, with that trend becoming more pronounced when the data is sliced for small businesses with fewer than 100 employees, constituting 37% of total respondents. For one thing, use of GenAI is more sparse among small businesses, as 45% said they don’t use GenAI at all, compared to 37% of the general survey population.
Among users, however, a higher percentage, 43%, said GenAI has increased productivity significantly, as compared to 40% of the general survey population. Also, 15% said AI has become “indispensable” to their work and only 26% have become more concerned about data privacy since starting to use GenAI.
The data shows that companies of all sizes stand to benefit greatly from use of GenAI once employees better understand how the technology can benefit them. The challenge, then, is to have employees try it for themselves, even if they’re preconditioned to dislike it.
Overcoming Hesitancy
Sales are of paramount importance to small businesses, yet so many sales teams remain disconnected from business operations, or the individual representatives become inundated with administrative tasks and lose sight of bringing in new customers. The situation becomes even more complicated when sales reps maintain their own clients and might, understandably, be hesitant to share that data with the larger organization.
The data points to a straightforward strategy: Small business owners should take a step back and consider where the data nucleus of their company should reside. For many, a centralized CRM makes the most sense, particularly when working with a remote workforce or a tight-knit team of jacks-of-all-trades. When a piece of information is updated within a CRM, other employees can receive alerts and rest assured any data they try to access later will be fully current. This unlocks better strategic decisions and a spirit of collaboration.
In addition, many CRMs now come equipped with GenAI woven into their fabric. These helpers, such as Zoho’s Zia, can handle complex calculations, data analysis and visualizations, recommendations for next steps, and automatic meeting transcriptions, leaving sales representatives free to conduct research on potential clients or hop on calls with distressed customers without worrying about falling behind. They’ll feel these tangible benefits, at which point companies can educate them on how training GenAI with customer data can improve its output exponentially.
This would also be a great time for these companies to emphasize their commitment to data privacy.
Lean Into Limitations
Despite the hype, GenAI is not capable of accomplishing every task under the sun—and, even those it can handle are prone to errors that only humans can suss out.
However, the imperfection of the technology can turn into a tool to increase adoption. If a small business has decided to implement GenAI, they can ask its employees to try and break it. Have them ask complicated questions, produce impossible results, or perform tasks of near-infinite complexity. Employees will see GenAI fail, sure, but most importantly, they will see GenAI succeed and have a better sense of how human fail safes can be incorporated into workflows to avoid errors. Once employees see themselves as part of the process, they can begin to explore GenAI’s benefits as a helper rather than something coming for their job.
Employees will be able to see the types of tasks GenAI can handle. According to the survey, 19.9% use it to quick answers to work-related questions; 15.3% create email content; 12.2% video-creation; 11.6% summarize long business documents; 11.2% to write content; 8% to edit videos; and 4.6% to write code. These represent a wide variety of work that employees will likely be happy to offload.
What’s Next?
The GenAI conversation has moved beyond the tech industry, as evidenced by the fact that all employees surveyed, regardless of industry, company size, or role within the organization, remain skeptical about the future of AI—even those who have never used it before. Changing overall sentiment is a gargantuan task no small business should ever take up, but by introducing GenAI strategically, these companies will show employees that the end goal is to increase their productivity, not replace them.
