What are the key things you need to know about AI?

AI is everywhere in the headlines. Some say it will replace entire industries. Others claim it’s just smoke and mirrors. For a small business owner, it can feel like a mix of excitement and confusion. Let’s strip it back to basics.

AI isn’t a robot brain sitting in a lab. At its core, it’s software that can learn patterns from data and then use those patterns to make predictions or generate responses. Think of it like a very smart spreadsheet that has been trained on far more data than any one person could ever read.

Today’s AI breakthroughs come mainly from large language models (LLMs) like GPT. These are systems trained on billions of sentences from the internet. They don’t “think” like humans. Instead, they’re extremely good at predicting the next word in a sentence, which surprisingly turns out to be enough to answer questions, draft text, translate languages, and even write code.

Key concepts you need to understand

• Data: AI runs on examples. The more and better quality data it sees, the better it performs
• Training: This is the process where an AI is fed data and “learns” patterns
• Models: A model is just the software that has been trained to spot patterns
• Tokens: AI reads text in chunks called tokens (a word, or part of a word)
• Hallucination: When an AI makes up an answer that is wrong. This happens because it is predicting words, not checking facts
• Fine-tuning: Teaching an AI to specialise in a particular domain, like customer service for your booking system
• Context: AI doesn’t know your business automatically. You give it context (like your policies or schedules)
• Human in the loop: AI is powerful, but it works best when combined with human oversight

Reality vs the hype

AI can save you time on repetitive tasks like drafting replies, summarising documents, or updating bookings. It can scale customer service so you don’t need someone answering the same “what time do you open?” question hundreds of times. It’s improving rapidly, and models today are far more capable than even two years ago. However,

• AI isn’t “intelligent” in the human sense. It doesn’t truly understand your business or your customers without context
• It won’t run your company by itself. It needs guidance, guardrails, and human judgment
• It’s not always right, blind trust can lead to mistakes

Common misconceptions

• AI thinks like a human: It doesn’t. It predicts patterns in data but has no true understanding
• AI is accurate: It is not. It can be confidently wrong. Human judgment is still essential
• AI knows your business automatically: It doesn’t. You need to give it the right context and information
• AI is plug-and-play magic: It requires setup, training, and oversight to be useful

What this means for your business

The winners won’t be the companies that ignore AI, nor the ones that hand everything over to it. The winners will be those who use AI smartly to cut admin, to give faster answers to customers, and to free up staff to focus on the high-value, human parts of the job.

At Breezy, we believe AI is most powerful when it plugs into your booking system and takes care of the customer service grind. That means no backlogs of WhatsApp messages, no endless emails, and no lost bookings. Just happy customers who get instant answers, and a team free to focus on running the business.