Preparing Your Business for the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence is likely to change the world more than anything we have experienced before. While it is difficult to predict exactly what that change will look like, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: learning how to use AI—and learning how to operate a business in a world shaped by AI—is going to be essential.

At InflatableOffice, we’ve been paying close attention to AI from the very beginning. We recognized early on that it could either become an incredibly powerful tool for our business or create significant challenges for us. So we’ve made a point of watching its development, experimenting with it, and thinking about what it means for our industry.

AI Has Changed Faster Than We Expected

When we first started looking seriously at AI, our reaction was fairly simple: Maybe someday it will be useful. At the time, getting AI to produce something genuinely useful often required so much work and refinement that it was easier to just do the job ourselves. We decided not to rely heavily on it yet, but we continued to monitor the technology and experiment with what it could do.

Then, sometime within the past year, we began to see some significant leaps. As a software company, we realized that AI had become remarkably capable at programming and development. It wasn’t just a novelty anymore. It was becoming something that could fundamentally change the software-development landscape, and that meant we couldn’t afford to ignore it.

AI Is Powerful—but It Isn’t Perfect

One of the most important things to understand about AI is that it is not always right. AI can produce remarkably convincing answers, images, content, and software while still making mistakes. If you assume that everything it produces is correct, you can end up repeating its mistakes rather than benefiting from its capabilities.

There’s another danger that may be even more subtle: AI will often tell you what you want to hear. It may be the smartest echo chamber we’ve ever seen. If you ask a question in a way that suggests the answer you want, AI can be remarkably good at giving you an answer that reinforces what you already believe.

That can feel good, but it doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Be careful that you aren’t believing an AI response simply because it makes you feel right. Challenge it, and challenge yourself. Ask it to consider the opposing argument. Ask what assumptions you’re making. Ask what could make your conclusion wrong. And when the information matters, check the sources and verify the answer independently.

At least for now, AI shouldn’t be viewed as something that replaces your judgment. It is a tool that can dramatically increase what you are capable of doing—but you still need to be involved.

That doesn’t diminish its usefulness. Quite the opposite. AI can save an enormous amount of time and help you accomplish things that previously required significant effort. You can give an AI tool access to your website and ask it to create a flyer containing the important information about your business. You can ask it to organize the information about your products into a booklet that you could print and distribute. There are many different AI tools available today, including ChatGPT, Claude, and others, along with different AI models running behind those tools. Some are more capable than others, and some cost more than others.

There is a lot to learn, but the best way to learn is to start using it.

Don’t Wait Until You Understand Everything

You don’t know what AI can do for your business until you try it. Start with the things that make your life easier. Look at repetitive tasks, things that take you a lot of time, writing, organizing information, creating marketing materials, analyzing information, brainstorming ideas, or turning information you already have into something useful.

You may be surprised by what AI can accomplish.

But there is another side to this conversation that is particularly important for business owners: AI could fundamentally change the competitive landscape.

AI Could Change the Competitive Landscape

As an industry, we need to think about how we’re going to survive and adapt to the AI age. AI has the potential to make certain capabilities dramatically easier and less expensive to obtain. Things that may have taken a company years to develop could potentially be accomplished much faster with AI.

That creates both opportunities and risks.

We’ve seen people use AI to create some genuinely impressive software. I’ve watched people build applications on top of our own software, and I’ve been amazed by what they’ve been able to accomplish through creativity, experimentation, and effective prompting.

But there’s an important distinction between creating software that works and creating reliable software.

The Hidden Danger of AI-Generated Software

Think about an AI-generated article. If AI gives you an article containing incorrect information, you can read it, fact-check it, research the questionable claims, and determine whether the information is accurate. The same is true with an AI-generated image. You can look at the image and notice obvious problems—maybe the person has six fingers, too many arms, or something else that doesn’t make sense.

Software is different.

Software can appear to work perfectly because you’re testing it under the conditions you happen to be using at that moment. But experienced software developers know that what you do with a piece of software today isn’t necessarily what someone else will do with it tomorrow. There can be bugs, security issues, unexpected conditions, and other problems buried beneath the surface.

This is where “vibe coding”—building software primarily by describing what you want to an AI—can become particularly risky for someone without software-development experience. A developer isn’t simply looking at whether the software works. They’re also thinking about what is happening underneath the surface: Are things being handled correctly? Are there security vulnerabilities? What happens under unusual conditions? Could a particular sequence of events cause something unexpected? Are there flaws that won’t appear until the software is being used in a completely different way?

Additionally, AI code can be harder to maintain or add to if you want to make changes later.  AI isn’t always interested in the most efficient way to code a task.  It may only care that it works.  Additionally, your prompting could be poor and introduce many inefficiencies as well.  AI code adoption without professional review is quite dangerous to use and to build a long-term business on  

Those are much harder questions to answer if you don’t have the experience to inspect and understand the underlying code.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t use AI to build software. In fact, we believe the opposite.

Don’t Fight AI—Learn to Harness It

At InflatableOffice, we are very much pro-AI. Not because we believe AI is perfect, and not because we think every use of AI is automatically good. We are pro-AI because we recognize that it is happening whether we like it or not.

We can’t fight it, and if we could, it wouldn’t make sense to.

The businesses that refuse to adapt may eventually find themselves competing against businesses that have learned how to use AI to dramatically increase their capabilities. So we’re approaching AI from the perspective of: How do we harness it? How do we leverage it? How do we incorporate it into what we do? How do we empower you to use it in our software?

That’s the direction we’re taking with our own software development, as well. There is a lot more coming, and we’ll have more to say about that as it develops.

What AI Can’t Do May Be Just as Important

One of the most interesting questions businesses should be asking isn’t simply, “What can AI do?” It’s also, “What can’t AI do?”

There are things AI is very good at—particularly creating one-off solutions designed around the needs of a particular person or business. But there are other things that are much harder to replicate. One of those is networking.

AI can create a solution for you, but a network becomes valuable because other people participate in it. If your business has a capability that depends on connecting people, building relationships, creating a community, or getting an entire industry to participate, that’s fundamentally different from simply creating a tool for one person.

That network effect can become incredibly valuable. It may be one of the areas where businesses can create advantages that are much harder for an individual using AI to replicate.

Two Things Every Business Should Be Doing

As AI continues to develop, I think there are two important things every business should be doing.

1. Identify what AI can’t easily replicate

Look carefully at your business. What do you provide that is difficult to duplicate? What relationships have you built? What networks do you participate in? What expertise, trust, community, or experience do you have?

If AI allows competitors to suddenly accomplish things that once took you years to develop, you need to have something else that differentiates your business—something valuable that AI can’t simply reproduce. Find that strength and make it better.

2. Don’t resist AI

At the same time, don’t stick your head in the sand. Pay attention to what is happening. Experiment with AI. Try different tools. Follow the developments. Find the things that make your business more efficient and use them.

You don’t have to become an AI expert overnight. You simply need to start learning.

The businesses that understand how to combine human strengths with AI capabilities will have opportunities that didn’t exist before. AI isn’t something that’s coming someday. It’s already here.

The question isn’t whether it will change your industry. The question is how you are going to adapt to the change—and what you are going to do with the opportunities it creates.

Lastly, I wrote this with AI.  I recorded myself on a Loom video.  It had most of this content in the video, and it was disorganized.  It was one take and I just spoke about what came to mind at the moment.  AI turned it into an organized and readable article.  Then I proofread it and had it fix many things.  I asked it to reduce the number of one line paragraphs, which it did but could have done better. I gave it a bit of additional content missing from the video I wanted added.  I also wrote this section by hand and added a few other sentences. I was able to probably save an hour of time doing it this way.  Like it or not, AI is here.  Take control of it before it takes control of you. 

Learn more about: AI Powered Tools built for Party, Inflatable, and Event Rental Businesses