April 30, 2025
By: Kevin Oklobzija
Artificial intelligence is already a game-changer for businesses of all sizes, from the local company with 20 employees to global conglomerates.
But if you haven’t implemented a strategy for using AI, it’s not too late. John Loury, president of Rochester-based data and analytics consulting firm Cause + Effect Strategy, has a checklist, starting with education.
Step 1: “You have to upscale yourself and your team by doing some research; identify local partners and advisors who can actually share some experiences and success stories,” Loury said. “Going it alone is lonely and can be very costly.”
Step 2: Are you ready from a data perspective? Do you have clean and structured data to train AI models?
“That’s going to be the first question that any software tool asks,” he said. “It really is the age-old concept of garbage in, garbage out, so you need to be prepared to take on any sort of AI technology.”
Step 3: Are you prepared from an ethical standpoint?
“You obviously want to maintain transparency in how you come to certain conclusions and you want to minimize bias as much as possible,” Loury advises. “And quite frankly in the finance area, certain things are illegal. You have to mask certain information around certain demographics.”
Step 4: Change management. Make sure everyone in your company understands AI’s role.
“You have a whole generation of people that, when they hear AI, they think about a certain movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and that machines are coming for them,” he said.
Step 5: Realizing that AI tools are not a one-size-fits-all. “Try to find tools that align with your business size, your goals and your industry.”
Step 6: Create a roadmap. Prioritize the areas of your business that could benefit from AI based on the people and process and technology that you have today, he said.
“The current iteration of AI really focuses on automation,” Loury said. “If you’re doing a lot of clerical tasks — data entry and data processing, very rudimentary, fingers on keyboard — those are the sort of tasks that this current iteration of AI has come for.
“If you’re heavily into programming, AI has automated those processes. Customer support is another. Those are areas where this iteration of AI has come in and had a positive impact.”
There are plenty of AI tools that small businesses can consider for internal processes. For example, Salesforce AI.
“Any company of 50 people or more could probably benefit from the use of Salesforce,” Loury said.
Another big-use case is in operations and supply chain, where AI can provide demand forecasting.
“AI models can help predict what those fluctuations will be,” Loury said. “A tool that we see a lot of customers using on the supply chain side is Coupa. That’s a way to process invoices and approve and disprove certain financial aspects of a company.”
And you certainly don’t need to operate the technology field to take advantage of AI benefits.
“You could be a tool and die shop in Ontario, New York, and be using Tableau with Einstein AI to visualize data, you could be using Coupa for your invoice processing and you could be using HubSpot to help manage your outbound marketing efforts,” Loury said. “You would have three different solutions that would be tuned to a company of your size that are all infused with AI features and components. And it would require very little investment to do so.”
AI won’t be replacing the person who asked for the report or the how-to instructions. It’s simply providing more time for that person to concentrate on more important tasks.
For now, that is. Machines coming for jobs is no longer just some sci-fi concept, it could become reality through Agentic AI.
“That technology is being talked about today,” Loury said. “Agentic AI would tackle tasks, analyze the problems, provide solutions and develop strategies to achieve those outcomes with very little human interaction.
“Generative AI helps to create something from a bunch of things. I ask ChatGPT a question, it spits back stuff. Agentic AI can actually do. If you haven’t heard the term Agentic AI, you will very soon. It has the potential to critically think and make decisions. Whereas generative AI is giving you the plan, Agentic AI can actually execute on the plan, and that has real-world implications for people who previously would have been making those decisions.”