A local technology firm is witnessing an explosion of interest in artificial intelligence.

Dmitry Mnushkin, president of local software development company Treefrog Consulting, said in its 11 years in operation it has never seen so much interest in new technology from the business community.

“We are having conversations on a daily basis,” Mr Mnushkin said.

He described the pace of change as “breathtaking”.

“We are doing things now in hours that were taking months last year,” he said.

The tech expert thought any business could benefit from AI if only they knew how to use it.

“Most companies are not ready,” he said. “There is a large knowledge gap around what is possible to achieve versus what is practical. No one has the time to keep pace with nearly daily announcements and functionality releases.”

Treefrog is launching a service to help businesses dip their toes in the AI waters, before jumping into the deep end.

“We want to give businesses an opportunity to rapidly trial various AI solutions and quickly discover the highest-impact implementations to enhance decision-making, optimise processes and accelerate growth,” Mr Mnushkin said.

A four-step approach is being taken.

“The first step is to identify high return on investment AI use cases to trial,” Mr Mnushkin said. “Next is to rapidly build out proof of concepts for each promising idea — all taking less than a month to complete. The third step is evaluation of the PoCs by the customer and the final step is covering the most successful prototypes to an enterprise solution.“

He said fear is holding a lot of businesses back.

“Its new and scary,” he said. “New companies are emerging on a daily basis to take advantage of the gold rush and it can be hard to pick a particular technology. People are not aware of all the possible use cases so don’t think their business could benefit.”

However, he likened AI to a precocious child.

“It will do its best with whatever instruction you give it, and sometimes it will make stuff up,” he said. “You have to educate people on how to use it most effectively.

“Just like when Google first came out, people needed to understand how key word searches worked. Now, they need to understand that an AI works best when you can provide it a lot of context before asking it to do something.”

He said privacy and security concerns are being actively addressed by the major makers of AI tools. Microsoft, creator of CoPilot, and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, have agreed to indemnify users of their systems from any copyright infringement claims. They have also adjusted their licensing to clearly state they will not use your data for training their AI.

People can start implementing AI solutions for free.

“Most of the most widely used services have a free tier,” he said. “ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s Bing Chat image creator, costs nothing and yet can have a huge impact on a small business. Those businesses that want to integrate AI tools into their own systems will pay more, but a lot of value can be gained with a minimal investment.”

Treefrog was unable to give concrete data on how much artificial intelligence might improve revenues, but the firm’s president said: “The companies that figure it out will gain a significant advantage over those who lag behind.”