3 Critical Mistakes to Avoid When Building AI Tools for Your Business

Integrating AI tools into your business workflows offers enormous potential. Automate processes. Streamline workflows. Increase overall productivity.

However, there are critical pitfalls that cause friction losses and customer frustration, especially among those who appreciate personalized services and the human connection. 

Here’s a breakdown of three core mistakes to avoid, based on our experience at Tasty Edits in developing a set of proprietary AI tools to help YouTube creators scale their channels and build closer partnerships with them. 

Key facts: 

• Don’t implement AI for the sake of implementing AI — address concrete productivity challenges and optimize targeted workflows 
• Plan your rollout carefully and invest in building as custom-tailored a solution as possible 
• Prioritize human connections rather than faking them — AI should free up time to focus on the individual needs of your clients and to build closer partnerships 

1. Choosing the wrong AI implementation

To begin with, one common mistake among businesses building AI tools is to choose the wrong implementation — and for the wrong reasons. 

These days, it feels like every business out there is integrating AI into their service model just to be able to advertise it. But rushed implementations — especially when they rely on hastily-picked third-party tools — are more likely to result in bugs, customer frustration and damage to your brand. 

We have had to tread particularly carefully. As a video editing service and YouTube channel management company, Tasty Edits is operating at the heart of the creator economy, where AI use is hotly contested. Many creators have integrated AI into their workflows, from drafting scripts to editing videos. But just as many express concern about what it means for the future of their industry, including giants like Mr Beast. 

Our clients appreciate us for the quality of service that we offer. Highly-skilled video editors attuning to their unique voice and giving a human touch to their content’s narrative. Seasoned YouTube channel managers jumping on in-depth strategy calls with creators to brainstorm and to strategize to reach their channel goals. 

A botched AI implementation, we knew, would do far more damage than good. But we still saw the opportunity that AI offered when it came to the torrents of data our channel managers contend with on a daily basis. 

Rather than relying on existing tools, including the AI functionalities in YouTube Studio, we took a more custom-tailored approach in line with our bootstrapped business philosophy. 

2. Failing to craft proprietary tools for specific workflows 

Second, many businesses are not specific enough when it comes to the problems that they want to tackle by using AI tools. Which workflows do you want to optimize, what are your areas of friction and how exactly can AI add value? 

We began by looking at existing tools and pinpointing what they could not do. What were their weaknesses? What functionalities were missing? What challenges did they not address? 

We knew that AI could help our channel managers analyze all the data from clients’ channels, which they had to slog through manually up until that point. Looking at dozens of metrics for every YouTube channel, comparing time periods and trying to unearth trends and correlation was taking up a huge chunk of their time. 

Existing tools, however, had one major shortcoming. They didn’t take into account the context of a creator’s channel — their overall goals, brand voice, personal attitudes and aspirations. Our channel managers already knew these in detail, thanks to the weekly calls and strategy meetings. 

It’s this challenge that the proprietary AI tools that we developed tackle. They take the vast amounts of analytics data on each channel’s overall and individual video performance. And they combine them with the individual context of the creator’s channel, gathered through personal, human interactions. 

Plus, they allow channel managers to access all relevant information through a central interface, rather than having to jump between the profiles of individual creators on YouTube. This reduces friction losses on top of everything else. 

It definitely cost more. It would’ve been faster and cheaper to plug in a third-party tool than to advertise that we now offer AI-powered insights. But thanks to that investment, we now have a streamlined tool perfectly suited to our needs and our clients’. And we know what goes on under the hood. 

3. Minimizing human moments instead of prioritizing them 

Finally, a third critical mistake in developing proprietary AI tools is to use them as a way of minimizing human moments with your clients, instead of prioritizing them. 

Too many companies see AI purely as a time saver — or even a personnel saver — and will happily outsource as much client interaction as they can. 

At Tasty Edits, we specifically developed our AI tools with the goal of helping channel managers reduce the time they spend poring over numbers to increase the time they have for connecting with creators. AI is unparalleled when it comes to processing data and unearthing patterns and trends in highly individualized ways. But all of this is a support, not a replacement, for the partnership we build with clients. 

Clients appreciate this. To date, we’ve seen positive feedback from all of them, both in terms of the quality of service our channel managers can provide and in terms of the insights they’ve gained for their channel strategies. This is reflected in their channel performance — on average,  they’ve seen just under 20% more watch time, as well as more watch time per view. 

The bottom line? Proprietary AI tools can be an invaluable support in enhancing productivity and building stronger relationships with clients — provided that they address concrete needs, are well-implemented and are integrated for the right reasons.