MSME Digest with Kola Owolabi
I just finished a proposal for a client within 20 minutes. It will have taken me minimum of three hours if I were to have worked on my own. However, using CHATGPT cut the time more than tenfold. How about the quality of the output, near perfect, I must confess. Formatting was good, punctuation excellent and a good job done in a fraction of the time it would have taken me, thanks to AI.
However, the usefulness of AI is put to question if you were to go to watch a football match and you see robots playing (maybe a time will come that we shall be watching robots play in a live match in a stadium). We are not talking about kids watching cartoon characters on TV or a puppet show on stage. We are talking of a live football match. I believe all the robot players will play perfectly in line with a predetermined pattern and no foot will be placed wrong. I am sure not too long a time no one will want to go to the stadium again. They will say let them show this stuff on TV. I can sit at home and watch it on TV like I watch a movie. People watch movies not because they think they are real, everyone knows that movies are acted out. We see the characters and believe their act. But we know behind our minds that it is not real, we are watching to fill out the time. The stadium act is quite different. You know that the players are not acting out any act. The dribble is real, the hack is real, the elbowing is real, the dive to head the ball is real and players don’t mind the personal risk they have on the field of play.
The entrepreneurial game is played the same way football matches are played. Whatever you do in the market place is done in the name of real action involving real characters that are ready to risk anything for the prize of a sale or patronage. The entrepreneurial instinct is like the instinct of a snake stalking its prey. The snake carries venom that everyone is afraid of. So when you see a snake you want to kill it immediately. Don’t you know that competitors in the market place view themselves the same way? Even when they are blood brothers, when it comes to business, it becomes a game of the survival of the fittest.
AI as we know it is near perfect, and can almost replicate every human instinct. But it will never replace the natural reaction that comes from every creature of God in their natural state. Trees growing up avoid obstacles and bend over to find a course to access open sunshine. Animals transverse long distances and risk terrible places in the hunt for food. The entrepreneur, in the hunt for business and patronage moves in response to innate instincts that are difficult to replicate in any other context. That is what will be difficult for AI to deliver.
AI will prepare the ground for you, get the ingredients together and even cook the food for you and make it as delicious as anybody can make it. I am talking about someone in food preparation business. But I believe everybody knows that it takes more than delicious meals to get people to patronize you. I visited a restaurant this morning just because I knew I will meet many people there to give flyers I had to give out and not because of the delicious meals served there (although their food is delicious and that is why people flock there).
In essence, AI is to be used as you will use a valuable staff that is adding so much value to your business. It will be very risky to build your business around that staff because your business will collapse the day that staff leaves you.
Kola Owolabi, CEO, David Solomon Consulting Limited is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Management Consultants (FIMC.CMC). The company has been helping entrepreneurs, both the new and highly experienced ones, plan and execute market entry with speed and minimal resources. The company can be reached via phone or WhatsApp at 08023203198.
