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.

Huge, VC-funded companies provide most of this technology and 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. In fact, I think it will, and we can already see this kind of thing with the latest frontier models of AI.

That means we’d be absolutely CRAZY to build a CRM that sends every click, report, search and screen load through AI. It creates dependency. It creates 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 – AI helps us build new CRM features faster, and we’re also building features that use AI to help you.

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

Where AI Actually Helps

My favourite thing we’ve built so far is Communications. AI is brilliant at understanding messy human data. Calls, emails and meetings are where the real work happens. Where we use AI? Transcribing, extracting actions, checking what was done, spotting sentiment, and finding things people miss.

Reporting is another good example. 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.

Avoiding AI Dependency

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 onto the side of our app and calling it “AI powered”. We’re using AI where it genuinely improves the product. We have plenty more ideas, and 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.