There’s no longer any debate about if your company should be using AI. With the rapid adoption of AI across every industry, the real question now is how your company should be using it—so it doesn’t get left behind.

 At Intrust IT, we’ve been using AI for a couple of years now to process, prioritize, and route all of our incoming email support requests. More recently, we started using AI to answer the phone when users call in for support. The new system can create new tickets, look up existing ones, route calls to available technicians, and handle many other tasks. These are perfect examples of repetitive tasks now being handled faster and more accurately than when they were done manually.

As we looked around the company, we began identifying even more opportunities to automate and improve with AI. But a nagging question started to pop up: just because we can automate something with AI, should we? And if we should, then how do we do it in a way that aligns with our values?

After much discussion and debate, we landed on two AI Guiding Principles to help us navigate these decisions. Here’s what we shared with our employee-owners:

As we explore using AI in our work, we want to keep things simple and focus on what really matters: people. These are the two key principles we follow when implementing AI:

 1. Freeing Us Up for What Matters Most
We use AI to handle the boring, repetitive, and mundane tasks. That way, we have more time to focus on what humans do best—building relationships, solving problems, and being creative.

2. Keeping It Human-Friendly
If AI interacts with people (clients, employees, or anyone else), we’ll only use it if it improves the human experience. And we’ll always let people know when they’re engaging with AI.

By sticking to these principles, we aim to work smarter—not harder—while keeping human connection at the heart of everything we do.

These principles work for our company, but every business is different. I encourage you to take the time to figure out what guiding principles make sense for your organization. Feel free to use ours as a starting point for the conversation.