The 1 Thing You Need to Know About AI and 5 Primary Ways to Use It

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Welcome to 2024! With your strategic planning goals in tow , it’s time to start executing!

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Getting started might seem daunting. The world is rapidly progressing, and our businesses are expected to keep up, whether we like it or not. With so much daily information to process and critical decisions to make, it’s easy to end each day feeling burned out and depleted.

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Success in the year ahead requires alignment of our brainpower and willpower. Increasing your knowledge of tools to work more efficiently and productively makes this possible. Efficiency and productivity are essential to having the concentration and clarity needed for you and your team to accomplish this year’s goals.

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This is why the time is ripe to increase your knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – what it is, how it works, and why it will give you a competitive advantage. AI seems to be all the rage now, so it’s easy to feel excited but also overwhelmed or even…scared.

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That’s why we recently launched a free audio AI conference on the Business Infrastructure podcast – to empower you with the knowledge required to select the right tools to streamline and even automate your back-office or administrative processes.

This AI audio conference began with a fireside chat featuring Kjell Carlsson , the head of AI strategy at Domino Data Lab . With a doctorate in economics and diverse experience leading data science teams over the past 20+ years, he has his finger on the pulse of the latest tech advancements and appropriately describes himself as an AI strategist and evangelist.

Starting with the Basics

The one thing you need to know about AI is that it isn't new! It's been around for a while and in my fireside chat with Kjell, he not only explained its evolution but explained how a particular breakthrough in 2017 led to its recent proliferation.

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The reason why, as Kjell described it, was the creation of the Transformer Network . This gave way to analyzing “…unstructured data like language, voice, images, and video…” in an unprecedented way. By November 2022, “…Chat GPT came along and created a killer application around this.”

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And just like that, the floodgates for AI applications opened and the rest is history.

Common Definitions

Learning new things can be challenging. It doesn’t help when highly technical terms are used with the assumption that people who are not technologists know what they mean.

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The alienation we can feel because of this knowledge gap can isolate us from tools to advance the way we operate and prevent us from adoption – all because we don’t know the language of a new or emerging technology.

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Here is a sample of common AI terms that Kjell explains in layman’s terms in this fireside chat :

• ?Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Generative AI
• Machine Learning
• Hallucination
• Artificial Neural Networks
• Large Language Models

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5 Primary Ways to Use Generative AI

Kjell makes the business case for thinking of and using generative AI as a digital assistant who can augment the work of people currently on your team to get more done in the same amount of time.

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1. First Draft Generator: creating an initial draft of content like an email, article, or sales presentation.
2. Information Summarizer: compiling and synthesizing large amounts of unstructured information to produce a concise summary.
3. Customer Listener: combing through sources of both customer and employee feedback mechanisms to determine their likes, dislikes, as well as their wants.
4. Application Enhancer: leveraging AI to boost the capabilities of existing apps and software leading to a more streamlined and intuitive customer experience.
5. Generating Data: consuming large amounts of data to look for patterns and offering opportunities, via open-source platforms, to fine-tune that data by providing your data and making responses to queries or prompts more accurate.

As groundbreaking a tool as AI, particularly generative AI is, it’s not a silver bullet that will solve all your common back-office operational problems like research, data entry, and content generation.

It still requires human thinking to prompt desired results as well as human intervention to massage those final results. ?Someone recently shared with me that his son is now on academic suspension at the university attends. His offense was using AI to write a paper without any editing or fact-checking.

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Kjell also mentions the other risks associated with AI through specific examples including cybersecurity breaches, voice manipulation to illegally obtain ransoms, and copyright infringement.

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Learn more about the common terminology of AI, the opportunities it presents, why you shouldn’t fear it despite the known risks, and much more in this first episode of our AI audio conference . You’ll also gain access to Kjell’s impressive list of free AI tools that you can start experimenting with to enhance your operations.

Stay tuned for even more information over the coming weeks on various AI applications you can use to dramatically transform the way you and your team work.

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If you found this article helpful, then subscribe to this newsletter to continue receiving strategies, tips, and tactics to enhance your company's operations. I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have about the productivity hacks I shared.

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About the Author

Alicia Butler Pierre is the Founder & CEO of Equilibria, Inc. – an operations management firm specializing in increasing enterprise value for fast-growing small businesses. She’s a software inventor, a two-time Amazon bestselling author, and producer of a top 2% podcast .

Alicia is also an adjunct instructor of Lean Principles at Purdue University and serves as the USA Chair of the G100’s Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises. The Process Excellence Network recognized her as a Top 50 Thought Leader in Operational Excellence. A chemical engineer turned entrepreneur, she’s designed and optimized processes for small businesses, large enterprises, non-profits, and government organizations alike.