ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini… Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and many business owners wonder what it can really do for them. You don't need to be a computer expert to understand it. Here, simply put, is how it works, what it does well and, above all, its limits, the ones people often discover too late.
How does an AI like ChatGPT or Claude work?
These tools are "language models". They have been trained on enormous amounts of text: books, articles, websites, technical documents. From this training, they have learned how words, sentences and ideas follow one another.
When you ask them a question, they build the answer word by word, each time choosing the most likely continuation given your request and everything said before. That's why they write so naturally, and it's also why they can be wrong with great confidence: they produce a plausible answer, not a verified truth.
A picture helps: imagine a very well-read assistant, who writes quickly and well and speaks many languages… but who knows nothing about your business until you explain it, and whose work always needs checking.
What it does very well
- Writing: a delicate email, a product sheet, an ad, a reply to a customer, a first draft of a quote.
- Summarising: a long document, a call for tenders, meeting minutes, in a few clear lines.
- Translating: your documents and messages, into most languages, keeping the tone.
- Answering: your customers' common questions, day and night, based on the information you give it.
- Sorting and extracting: finding the amounts on an invoice, sorting requests, filling in a table.
- Creating images and videos: visuals for your social media, product staging, short animations.
Its limits, to know before using it
- It can make things up. A figure, a date, a legal reference can be wrong while looking credible. Always check what matters.
- It states things far too confidently. AI presents its answers with assurance, even when they are wrong. It relies on information gathered from many websites and search engines, and on other people's experiences that are not always right, nor suited to your case. You really need to be wary of what it asserts.
- It doesn't know your business. Without your prices, your products and your rules, its answers stay general.
- Creating an image is easy; creating the right image is not. AI will always produce an image, but it can be full of flaws, with major errors of quality or context. Without a complete, precise request written by a professional, the result is often poor.
- It tends to do what everyone else does. A huge number of people use the same tools: the same content, the same phrasing, the same styles turn up everywhere. Standing out with an AI used as-is is difficult.
- It can be very expensive. A standard AI cannot deliver professional-quality work, and costs rise quickly. It's not unusual to see businesses spend large budgets on AI for a disappointing result.
- It doesn't make real decisions. AI has no intelligence in the true sense: it works through automatic patterns. It can mislead you with technical choices suited to other situations, but not precisely to yours.
- It needs lengthy preparation. An AI that really works for a business takes a lot of setup time: preparing the information, configuring, testing, correcting.
- Confidentiality. Before entrusting customer data or sensitive documents to a tool, check what it does with them.
For you: an improved dictionary and search engine
Day to day, a consumer AI works very well as an improved dictionary or an improved search engine: to rephrase a text, understand a subject, translate a message. On the other hand, using it to take on tasks you don't master, without experience, sometimes creates more problems than solutions: a website that tells your customers anything, visuals that damage your image, a budget that spirals.
Three concrete, well-prepared examples
A tradesman receives every quote request already summarised and sorted. A shop publishes its product sheets in three languages for its online store. A manufacturing company has its service reports summarised and its manuals translated for its customers abroad. In all three cases, the AI was prepared, configured and checked by professionals: it doesn't improvise, it removes the tasks that waste time.
And at ATARE?
For us, AI tools are software, working tools, just like any others. We never trust them blindly: every answer and every piece of content we produce with AI is checked and approved by experienced people who know their trade. A single reliable feature often takes months of programming, tuning and testing.
We see AI as an advanced tool that saves time, but which remains a software technology. That's why our teams follow regular, in-depth training in new technologies, to stay up to date and bring you real skills, not just a tool.
This is how we put AI to work for businesses: assistants on your website that answer your visitors day and night, in their language, using your own information; images, videos and avatars for your communication; automations on WhatsApp, LINE or Messenger. And in Eronda, our management software, an assistant prepares the work: all you have to do is approve.
