Swap Your Digital Shovel for an AI Excavator
- Mike Bogias
- Mar 1, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 28, 2024
Many consultants I have spoken with have not yet addressed the rules of play for AI tools such as ChatGPT. While some businesses ignore the issue or hope that no one will ask about how and when AI is used, Blueline Consulting believes that the technology should be acknowledged and embraced in one's work, and that use of AI should be made clear to your clients.
In the education world, New York City school officials have banned the use of AI, though we are not sure what effect this has had, while one forward-thinking UPenn business professor, Prof. Ethan Mollick, has mandated its use on assignments, while also laying out the groundwork for how the technology should be used responsibly.
Mollick's four principles heed warnings of AI's limitations while embracing new ways of working. These are good tips for any professional organization looking to communicate rules of engagement while taking a balanced approach to policy, somewhere between innovation and risk.
Over the last year, we have been doing extensive research and testing on the tools available to help us move faster while we improve the quality of our work. As a small outfit looking to gain an edge on the competition, you shouldn't expect anything less. To paraphrase Tony Robbins, you don't need more resources, you need resourcefulness.
Some functional tools you should be aware of include:
1. An AI-Powered Reading Assistant is *a must* for your toolbox. You'll catch mistakes in your reports and reduce the cognitive fatigue of, say, evaluating 10 tender submissions (300 pages each) in the span of a week or two. Combat word-blindness by letting your ears take on some of that mental weight. Our choice is the NaturalReader app because of it's top-end OCR scanner, high-quality text-to-voice, word-highlight, auto-page scroll and up to 3x reading speed:
2. AI Voice Meeting Notes: The days of personally typed meeting minutes should retire alongside NFL Quarterback Tom Brady. Plugins for MS Teams and tools like Otter.ai should not only make minutes a thing of the past, but these programs also help guide the discussion when it gets off topic (never happens, right?). A snapshot from MS Teams Premium here:
3. AI Plugins for Spreadsheets: Want an output but don't know the formula? That doesn't matter anymore. You can use your words to generate the output with no algebra required. There are now plugins for Excel and scripts for Google Sheets that will connect to your OpenAI (ChatGPT) API and allow use of instructions from within your sheet. Handy for reformatting and extraction tasks, as well as pattern recognition.
4. AI Presentations: PowerPoint is great and I bet most didn't know it comes equipped with an AI "presentation coach" that can help critique your slides and how you present to the camera. As great as PowerPoint's been, new AI presentation tools like Tome and BeautifulAI are going to simplify the process tenfold. Start exploring.
5. AI Database Query Tools: ChatGPT has an unfortunate limit of 4000 tokens which handcuffs users to a couple of pages of text, inclusive of the prompt (instruction). There are tools out there that allow you to search and query larger documents, so if you know what you're looking for, i.e. how long is the planned HFR rail corridor, the response will correctly pull out 1,150km from the report (no scrolling required). Imagine how fast this will make contract and code reviews on a well-trained database - we're not far off.
Bonus tip: Good prompts take time to write-up, and if written well they can be recycled. In the 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, Tim conducts a lovely test in asking an online executive assistant to send three emails. 23 hours later and $230 in cost, he later accepted that it was his poor instructions that ended up blowing his budget by 2,200%.
"Sentences should have one possible interpretation and be suitable for a 2nd-grade reading level. This goes for native speakers as well and will make requests clearer. Ten-dollar words disguise imprecision."
If you're savvy about recognizing patterns and repeat tasks, get yourself a hotkey program and store and label your detailed prompts and instructions there. We store prompts like "++sum" to extract executive summaries from reports and "++biascount" to extract bias statements within articles and reports. Something to think about as you peck on your keyboard.
AI technology is here to stay and those who are early adopters will undoubtably have an advantage. In the first five days of its release on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT had one million users. By January 31, 2023, 100 million members were on board. Assuming some doppelgangers, and users who are just playing around, and roughly 5 billion people around the globe with internet access (World Bank 2022), it's safe to assume <1% of people are really using this technology to their benefit. It's early.
As you sift through mountains of information, you might want to ask yourself whether it's time to trade your shovel for a Liebherr R9800...
And if you're a business owner, consider updating your company playbook to avoid unauthorized business uses, plagiarism, lethargic complacency, and potential for tarnished credibility.
If you found this article helpful, please like and share. Also, follow us on Twitter @BluelineProAI.
Disclosures
- Article written by Mike Bogias - Article editing and image generation by AI Software - Image prompts and GIF recordings on Twitter by Blueline Consulting - Published by Blueline Consulting
