ITea Talks with Simeon Hristov: AI-generated tool for social media

Artificial Inteligence is without a doubt one of the most discussed topics of the year. While many people only see the disadvantages of it, many others started gaining knowledge in this area and understanding the potential of AI.

In this edition of ITeaTalks we are sharing with you the experience of our adessi and AI Enthusiast Simeon Hristov. He has created his own unique AI-generated tool, that aims to support small and medium companies with their social media content.

What has triggered the need to create an AI-based marketing platform? Should companies invest in this area and retrain their employees? Does AI bring threats to people in the IT sector and will it lead to job cuts? Today we answer these questions with Simeon Hristov - Full-Stack Developer at adesso Bulgaria.

Hello, Simeon! Let's start today's conversation with a brief overview of the current market situation. What has triggered the need to create an AI-based marketing platform?

Hello! The fact is that the largest corporations in the world are investing huge financial resources in artificial intelligence. In my opinion, this will be the next industrial revolution that will make human work even more efficient and continue the trend that fewer and fewer people worldwide will be able to do more and more things and do them better. Basically, for a product to achieve its full potential in how many people it reaches and how useful it is in solving a particular problem, it must build on the trend of technological development. For me, there is one trend going up at the moment and that is artificial intelligence. Whichever company manages to gather as much knowledge in this area as quickly as possible, will have a very strong position in the years to come. For the time being, of course, artificial intelligence has not developed to the point where it can show its full potential, but it is certainly time to take steps in this direction so that promising companies can expand their market share at the expense of those that are lagging behind in technological innovation.

For now, the most advanced function of artificial intelligence is the creation of textual content. Because of that, we said, 'Okay, this is the technology we need to gather expertise and knowledge. Where can we integrate it?" We looked at the numbers of which industry has what revenue. We saw that marketing companies take up quite a bit of share and generate quite a bit of revenue. Moreover, their work is linked to software platforms that can be easily integrated and the data automatically picked up. We asked ourselves: which tasks in a marketer's daily life are related to content creation? A huge number of human resources are used to write and upload content for social networks. There, we found a very good opportunity for a product through which on the one hand we could be really useful and generate revenue and on the other hand gather know-how on how artificial intelligence works. The AI-generated tool, that I've created is called StartUpNow and it's an online platform for generating text and photo content and publishing them automatically on social networks. The product is designed to be used by startups as well as small and medium-sized companies that want the maintenance of their social profiles to cost less money without compromising on quality. It does this through integrations with ChatGPT, Dall-e, Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, and WooCommerce. The first two are used for the actual generation of the texts and photos, the second two for the automatic syncing of the posts, and the last two are used to automatically provide more information about the products to the users in case they have an online store built on one of the two platforms. By gathering more information about our customers' businesses, artificial intelligence can create better content.

What is your opinion about the so called Prompt Engineering? Do you think companies should invest in this and retrain their employees?

In the process of building the product, I faced a lot of problems caused by not knowing exactly what we need to give to AI in terms of information and structure so that we can get a quality answer. This is exactly the job of a prompt engineer. Along these problems, I realized the real need for such a specialist in any team working on an AI related product. After completing several courses and spending a huge amount of time learning how to interact with AI, I can say that without the expertise we gained, there was no way a quality AI-based product could have been created. Certainly companies need to direct and fund their employees who are interested in gathering knowledge about Prompt Engineering. Service companies will have to, if they want to be competitive, comply with this technology trend because if they don't comply and direct financial and human resources to this area, someone else will and take market share from them. I do not mean here to build aggressive and violent retraining strategies in a short period of time, but rather a smooth, tendentious and informative campaign about the new profession and its opportunities. In this way, people wishing to retrain will have time to build up the necessary knowledge, be organised into teams and then be able to fully use this expertise in real projects.

Do you think AI brings threats to people in the IT sector and will lead to job cuts?

Every technological revolution kills some jobs and creates others. My opinion is that AI can be a threat to professions that have the same mechanical actions that can be easily inserted into a scenario. What exactly do I mean? All people, whose job it is to take phone calls and assist with directions on how to fix ,let's say, your TV set are threatened by artificial intelligence. What they actually do is understand the customer's problem, find that problem in the list of described ones, and read them the solution. It's a mechanical action that will surely be replaced. There are even products like this already. Travel agencies are another example. This whole industry will be replaced by software to which users will say 'I am on holiday from the 12th to the 19th and I want to go to Rome with my husband'. The software will automatically take all the offers from hotels and properties that are available for short-term rentals, analyze which one the customer would like and fits the budget, book the tickets, book the car rental, make a day-by-day itinerary of the sights, and all the customer will have to do is follow the directions on their smartphone. But the fact that travel agencies will disappear does not mean that these people will be out of a job. There will be new needs for people that will create new jobs. I think people are so wired that when one of their needs is met, two more are created.

Why would you recommend studying AI in more detail and what advice would you give to people who want to get involved in it?

In my opinion, the best approach to get into this field is to first take a course to gain knowledge and systematise it, and then start programming your own idea. That idea doesn't need to be planned to be a final product, but rather to apply the knowledge from the course into something that works. The goal is to gain practical experience. It is very important that the person is just interested in doing artificial intelligence because this way the latest news, technologies and tools that have come out in the market will reach them. This way he will delve deeper into them and increase his professional expertise.