How are you using AI & how important is it to you and your business?

[Eddiemunster]

Before I dive into my thread, my Question is How are you using AI & how important is it to you and your business?

There's some great threads in the champions lounge and other parts of Square forums etc about AI.  I've been using Squares AI to dive into my numbers a little more, but I've been somewhat absent over the last few months as I've jumped into using generative AI for my business. 
Recently I've started using Claude and have mainly switched from ChatGPT for most of my AI work.  I've set up a few automations recently using Claude, Make.com, and google sheets to gather data from square-New customers and sales data mainly-and automated our work flow for SMS communication with new customers and SMS review requests.  For a complete newbie it wasn't easy and took a few days but I have a new found passion for how AI can reduce my workload as an owner and help me as an assistant with our business.
I've now setup an AI Brain with an outline of how I want AI to work for me, the types of answers and when it asks clarifying questions so it doesn't make too many if any assumptions.  From there I have created project instructions for my business so each time I start a project it has a set of instructions from me to create guardrails and boundaries.  
I've also started using it to map out my workload and regular "Busy" work and map ways my wife and I can use AI to reduce what we do each day/week/month.  There are some constraints and in the AI Brain we have constrained what AI can and cannot do around financial, HR and other sensitive areas. 
My next stage is to map out our financial spreadsheet that we entere sales and expenses into to track more accurately our profit each week so that we can automate this.  I'm also working on a tool to import Staff hours into Xero so it doesn't have to be a manual process each fortnight when we run a pay cycle. 
So my question is How are you using AI & how important is it to you and your business? How much have you integrated AI into your daily work running your business and what are you using it for?  I'd love to see what ideas people have had and how much you are relying on AI to help you out-has it become as much as a VA (Virtual Assistant) or are you still working on how to integrate it into your business.  @JTPets hows your delivery scheduler running-that looks really cool.  I may have to chat to you about how your using it and how it's going. 
I'd love to hear what crazy thoughts you've had for AI as well. 

[JTPets]

The first rule of AI Fight Club is set up clean data or else all other use cases are moot 😜

I am working on a foundational tool for my business to run all future automations out of - SQTools.ca has become my future SaaS tool but today I am the client, the developer, the beta tester, and AI wrangler. I am using it to add functions to my Square data like vendor management and purchase orders. I am making tools for auditing my catalog for completion, I am trying to ensure full, accurate date in a AI digestable format that ideally is not platform dependant and can move with my business needs to whatever platform I need it in.

[rtfulk]

I've incorporated AI into our description workflow. I start with a photo send it to AI and it will remove the background, set the size to 2048x2048, then reduce the file size. After that I use my prompts to insert an AI model, for a still photo, then a 5 second video. Then to finish off it will write a description for me. It really cuts my time down putting up photos.

Recently Tammy has started doing some of her designs on AI and she has been impressed with how they are turning out.

[JG_Brewing]

AI is everywhere in our business now from marketing to sales - content creation, etc. Hard to avoid such a powerful tool especially in the application of cutting costs or reducing time in the workflow. 

[doc_choc]

To be honest we really haven't embraced the power of AI in our business, we have used it for some of the more simpler tasks for creating some visuals for marketing campaigns or to assist with improving some aspects of photography and product descriptions. Rather than going full on with it we are letting other organizations and people do the leg work, figuring out what it can be used for, how they are adapting AI to help their business. I appreciate AI will help save time when running a business, but as a smallish enterprise we do not want to blow the time trying to figure it out, most likely not doing a great job of and then taking our eye of the ball with the business development and growth. We are excited about AI but we are giving development time and breathing space before placing trust in it to deliver eutophia.