How We’re Using AI in Tall Emu

How AI is Being Used to Make Businesses Run Better with Tall Emu

A lot of customers ask what we’re doing with AI in Tall Emu, so I figured it was time to put pen to paper (and review with AI before publishing, of course).

I’m super bullish on AI. I use it all day, every day, and so do the rest of our team.

But I’m also cautious.

Most of this tech is being provided by huge, VC-funded companies that will eventually want profit. Uber was cheap while VC money was subsidising fares and drivers. Once it became the default, fares went up and the drivers didn’t exactly get rich.

AI could easily go the same way; I think it will, and we can already see this kind of thing with the latest frontier models of AI.

What that means is we’d be absolutely CRAZY to build a CRM where every click, report, search and screen load gets sent through AI, creating both a dependency and a cost. And for what? We’re not looking to raise venture funding; we’ve no investors to dazzle – so we don’t need to get on the hype train.

Don’t get me wrong though – we’re building new features in CRM faster because we use AI, and we’re building features for you that use it too.

We’re going to use it where it makes sense.

My favourite thing we’ve built so far is Communications. AI is amazing at understanding messy human data; calls, emails, meetings – all that messy “human to human” stuff is where the real work happens. Where we use AI? Transcribing, extracting actions, checking what was done, spotting sentiment, and finding things people miss.

Reporting. I think it’s crazy to ask an AI how much you sold last month. Our solution: Let AI build you a dashboard or report you can run whenever you want. Even better: Drag a PDF report you like into Tall Emu, and our AI builds it for you.

What we want to avoid is an AI outage bringing your business to a halt. If AI is down, you have to make new reports manually for a while. Not a huge impact.

Talking dollars again, if AI gets expensive would you rather spend $10 for a custom report, or $2 every time you want to check your sales history?

Anyhow, that’s the plan. We’re not gluing a chatbot on the side of our app and saying we’re “AI powered”. But we are using AI where it matters to make our product better, and while we have a heap more ideas for how to do that, we’re always open to suggestions.

Most of our customers just want to run their business, and so that’s where our AI focus is.