Here's what you should think about before rolling this hot new technology into your business. Photo via Getty Images

The world has been captivated by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program that can understand and respond to questions and statements using natural language, just like humans. It has been trained on a large amount of text data and uses this knowledge to generate helpful and informative responses to users.

As great and resourceful as this can be, there are some major aspects about it that can be harmful in a business setting, such as the inability to make personal connections. A sales manager using AI to write sales scripts cannot incorporate the emotional intelligence needed to form a connection. With the switch to AI and loss of this personal touch, the company’s close rate drops significantly, and the sales manager’s effort to find solution may just be to run more numbers in terms of contacts and sales attempts, which usually exacerbates the problem.

Another example of how ChatGPT can hurt your business is by relying on it to generate website and social media content. A business owner that believes ChatGPT will do the “heavy lifting” and grow his or her business is overlooking the importance of creating real and experiential marketing experiences for customers. Business owners can inadvertently spend entire budgets on AI driven social media ands and not have the sales numbers to cover these costs due to their low returns on investments for many industries and keep the business in operation.

The overarching theme, or danger behind ChatGPT, is that people are relying heavily on it to produce their work. After all, relying on technology is part of our human nature. When great technology is introduced, such as email, teleconferencing, AI assisted searching, etc., we rarely ask ‘how can this technology assist me?’ versus ‘how can this technology do things for me?’ The greater the technology, the greater likelihood humans will take the easiest path.

ChatGPT not only affects businesses, but it also applies to education. Teachers are already seeing a drop in math skills as kids carry around calculators. Just wait until next semester when educators are reading thousands of essays written by ChatGPT.

Just as we would hate to see our children deprive themselves of actual skills, the same can be said for our business people. Some of the main issues that arise from the use of ChatGPT are:

Diminishing Rates of Return

When we embrace technology to the point that we no longer put forth effort from a practiced skill set, we can expect to see declining engagement rates, click-through rates and customer loyalty. As of 2023, the online engagement rate has fallen from 5% to 0.06%. Click-through rates are not faring much better with a measly 6.3%. As these numbers continue to fall (which they have every year for the past couple decades now), we continue to just brush it off as this is how business is done.

Aversion in the Marketplace

People are becoming so displeased with technology driven processes (as opposed to technology assisted processes) that they have a strong aversion to companies using it. How many social media ads have prompted you to make a purchase? How many times do you provide a bogus email to a website form? When doing a search, how many times do you scroll to the bottom without looking and hit page two because you know you are not getting any real results on the first page anymore?

Yes, ChatGPT is cool and yes, there are some amazing uses you can implement into your business; however, do not look at it as the answer to any and all business problems. Embrace your craft as a leader and avoid subbing the work out to tech - doing so could cost you everything.

As a business owner myself, I am not opposed to technology. I am all in favor of what technology can do. However, there is no denying that the more we look to technology to do the work for us instead of with us, the more we see a drastic decline in the overall skill set of business people without an increase in business success rates.

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Josh Tolley is the founder of Kingsbridge LLC and is based in Houston.

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3 Houston innovators who made headlines in May 2025

Innovators to Know

Editor's note: Houston innovators are making waves this month with revolutionary VC funding, big steps towards humanoid robotics, and software that is impacting the agriculture sector. Here are three Houston innovators to know right now.

Zach Ellis, founder and partner of South Loop Ventures

Zach Ellis. Photo via LinkedIn

Zach Ellis Jr., founder and general partner of South Loop Ventures, says the firm wants to address the "billion-dollar blind spot" of inequitable distribution of venture capital to underrepresented founders of color. The Houston-based firm recently closed its debut fund for more than $21 million. Learn more.

Ty Audronis, CEO and founder of Tempest Droneworx

Ty Audronis, CEO and founder of Tempest Droneworx

Ty Audronis, center. Photo via LinkedIn.

Ty Audronis and his company, Tempest Droneworx, made a splash at SXSW Interactive 2025, winning the Best Speed Pitch award at the annual festival. The company is known for it flagship product, Harbinger, a software solution that agnostically gathers data at virtually any scale and presents that data in easy-to-understand visualizations using a video game engine. Audronis says his company won based on its merits and the impact it’s making and will make on the world, beginning with agriculture. Learn more.

Nicolaus Radford, CEO of Persona AI

Nicolaus Radford, founder and CEO of Nauticus RoboticsNicolaus Radford. Image via LinkedIn

Houston-based Persona AI and CEO Nicolaus Radford continue to make steps toward deploying a rugged humanoid robot, and with that comes the expansion of its operations at Houston's Ion. Radford and company will establish a state-of-the-art development center in the prominent corner suite on the first floor of the building, with the expansion slated to begin in June. “We chose the Ion because it’s more than just a building — it’s a thriving innovation ecosystem,” Radford says. Learn more.

Houston university to launch artificial intelligence major, one of first in nation

BS in AI

Rice University announced this month that it plans to introduce a Bachelor of Science in AI in the fall 2025 semester.

The new degree program will be part of the university's department of computer science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing and is one of only a few like it in the country. It aims to focus on "responsible and interdisciplinary approaches to AI," according to a news release from the university.

“We are in a moment of rapid transformation driven by AI, and Rice is committed to preparing students not just to participate in that future but to shape it responsibly,” Amy Dittmar, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in the release. “This new major builds on our strengths in computing and education and is a vital part of our broader vision to lead in ethical AI and deliver real-world solutions across health, sustainability and resilient communities.”

John Greiner, an assistant teaching professor of computer science in Rice's online Master of Computer Science program, will serve as the new program's director. Vicente Ordóñez-Román, an associate professor of computer science, was also instrumental in developing and approving the new major.

Until now, Rice students could study AI through elective courses and an advanced degree. The new bachelor's degree program opens up deeper learning opportunities to undergrads by blending traditional engineering and math requirements with other courses on ethics and philosophy as they relate to AI.

“With the major, we’re really setting out a curriculum that makes sense as a whole,” Greiner said in the release. “We are not simply taking a collection of courses that have been created already and putting a new wrapper around them. We’re actually creating a brand new curriculum. Most of the required courses are brand new courses designed for this major.”

Students in the program will also benefit from resources through Rice’s growing AI ecosystem, like the Ken Kennedy Institute, which focuses on AI solutions and ethical AI. The university also opened its new AI-focused "innovation factory," Rice Nexus, earlier this year.

“We have been building expertise in artificial intelligence,” Ordóñez-Román added in the release. “There are people working here on natural language processing, information retrieval systems for machine learning, more theoretical machine learning, quantum machine learning. We have a lot of expertise in these areas, and I think we’re trying to leverage that strength we’re building.”