What To Learn from the Census Data on A.I. Use by Businesses

The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog

• The U.S. Census has released an Artificial Intelligence Supplement to its Business Trends and Outlook Survey. 
• According to this new Census data on A.I., only 5% of businesses reported that they used A.I. for their business
• In that same survey, 10% of businesses reported that it was unknown whether A.I. was used to produce goods and services within that two-week window.
• This leaves a lot of questions about A.I. in business, such as whether respondents perceived things such as using ChatGPT to create emails would count as producing a good or service. 
• The responses that formed these statistics were collected between December 2023 and February 2024. Given the pace of A.I.’s growth and adoption, the numbers may be higher now. 

The A.I. Supplement: Potential Issues

So, you can see the choice statistics above. What gives? Did we not all get told again and again that A.I. is changing the work world as we know it? 

Well, let us consider certain issues outside of the control of the statisticians compiling the data for this A.I. supplement. 

For instance, is it possible that a decent chunk of the “No” respondents really should belong in the “Don’t Know” category? Is it not possible that there are indeed some employees in an organization that use a gen A.I. chatbot to quickly create email replies to clients? (Such actions being technically under the category of “customer service”, these could readily satisfy the “goods or services” part of the survey question.) 

And then, of course, consider all the “Don’t Know”s that with the necessary knowledge could actually answer “Yes”. 

A report by the New York Times that mentions the Census data on A.I. for small business owners has an interesting section. 

The owner of an aerospace-equipment manufacturing company says that A.I. does not have any use on her factory floors. Worth mentioning is that this business owner has a Post-it Note with “ChatGPT” stickered onto her office’s desktop monitor, as a reminder to use ChatGPT to save herself time in certain areas. 

Now what is interesting about this is that it highlights a potential unintended consequence that results from all of the hype and general attention surrounding generative A.I. 

Gen A.I. refers to the platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini that can create text, images, and/or video based off a simple prompt. 

The technology is fascinating and important and innovative and game-changing for many reasons, of course, but it has pretty much hogged just about all of the A.I. spotlight since ChatGPT’s debut in late November of 2022. 

But it is far and away from being the only kind of A.I. available, especially for a business owner. 

So what we are looking at here, according to the Census data on A.I., is the issue that many business owners are not using A.I. because they simply do not realize the range of tasks that A.I. can help with in their chosen industry. 

Applications in Certain Areas

Let’s roll with the above example of a manufacturer who is curious about applications for A.I. on the factory floor. 

Most factory floors involve the use of heavy machinery that is essential to creating the final end-user product. 

The manufacturer’s use of such machines can become much more cost-effective and efficient overall through predictive maintenance. 

Predictive maintenance is just one example of an A.I. application that does not involve generating emails via chatbot. 

Instead, predictive maintenance A.I. will analyze a ton of data about your factory-floor equipment to find key insights. 

These will include things such as when the equipment should be serviced, to create a more data-based service schedule. 

Also included is the issue of figuring out when the equipment may break down. With this prediction, you can better prevent any costly–or potentially dangerous–breakdowns in or shutdowns of your operations.

Another potential use for the factory floor is more gen-A.I. oriented, which is (re)designing factory-floor layouts. 

This way, you can figure out some of the most energy-efficient and less-costly layouts for your floor. 

And of course we can extend this insight far beyond this particular industry to others. 

From accounting to medicine to real estate, the applications for A.I. exist, whether business owners are aware or not. Hence, why many businesses that leverage A.I. may end up seeing more profits and cut costs in the long run.