AI Today
Where to Start with AI in Your Business
- Author
- Bruce T. Dugan
- Published
- September 1, 2024
- Length
- 85 pages
- Format
- Kindle edition
- Publisher
- Incognito Worldwide
- ASIN
- B0DFVY228Q
What it is
Most business owners have stopped asking whether AI matters. They are asking a harder, more practical question: where does it touch my business, and what do I do on Monday?
The current conversation about AI is stuck at two unhelpful extremes. At the high level, pundits debate the future of global workforces and wholesale transformation. At the ground level, bloggers review endless lists of single-use tools.
AI Today — Book One in AI for Business Owners — operates in the space in between. It is written for active operators with a payroll to meet on Friday: no data science team, no transformation budget, no hours of free time. It is about finding out where your time is actually going, what these tools are genuinely good at, and how to measure the result.
Understanding the middle floor
One of the key ideas in the book is understanding exactly what AI is suited to handle in day-to-day operations.
| Adoption level | Operational focus | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Operational AI | Automating routine back-office workflows and data entry. | Streamlining billing, client scheduling, data transfer, and compliance. |
| Content & marketing | Enhancing customer touchpoints and materials. | Generating base drafts, editing videos, and scaling outbound campaigns. |
| Analytical AI | Extracting actionable patterns from operational data. | Predicting customer behaviors, identifying supply chain bottlenecks, and analyzing trends. |
The chapter breakdown
The book translates technical concepts into plain business language, without the jargon:
| Chapter | Focus & core theme | What you will master |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter 1 | Understanding artificial intelligence | The absolute fundamentals of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Demystify the vocabulary so you can make informed technical decisions. |
| Chapter 2 | A brief history of AI | How modern systems evolved from early neural networks. Understand the shifts that turned AI from an academic curiosity into an active commercial necessity. |
| Chapter 3 | Spotting opportunities | A step-by-step framework for auditing your current business processes. Identify the time-sink bottlenecks where manual repetition is costing you money. |
| Chapter 4 | Content & generation tools | Navigating named platforms for text, image, and video generation. Learn what these tools do well, where they fail, and how to integrate them into workflows. |
| Chapter 5 | Ethical & implementation risks | Managing algorithmic bias, ensuring data privacy, and keeping your systems compliant with industry and ADA regulations. |
| Chapter 6 | Measuring direct ROI | Setting concrete KPIs and building a realistic implementation roadmap. Establish the exact parameters needed to verify whether your tools actually paid for themselves. |
Get back the time that does not need you
AI will not rescue a broken business model, and it will never replace the need to understand your customers. What it will do — starting this week — is hand you back the billable hours you are currently spending on work that does not require your intelligence.
AI Today is the starting point: a short, concentrated book designed to be read in a single evening.
To go on to multi-model pipelines and automated workflows, see the companion volume, The AI Advantage: Building and Scaling Your AI Stack.