Forty to 50 years ago, a long-established camera company enjoyed long-established dominance of the market for instant photos. Until it didn’t.
The advent of digital photography, its omnipresence on mobile phones, and its rapidly increasing quality didn’t happen overnight. But it did happen without an effective, competitive response from the established camera company: Polaroid.
Which is today “barely a shell of what it once was,” Dr. Neil Morelli said in his presentation at the October offering in the monthly program series from “Chattanooga’s Artificial Intelligence Network,” or CHAIN, organized by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Center for Professional Education.
Each month, the series takes a look at a facet of work or business affected by the rise of AI technology. Morelli’s presentation came under the topic of “Workplace Tools: AI for Everyday Tasks.”
Morelli, chief organizational psychologist for a company called Codility, was joined by Jonathan Flower, an AI engineer and software architect. Both are based in Atlanta.
Morelli said he cited the fate of Polaroid as a call to action, to realize that now is a time of change being prompted by AI that can’t be ignored.
“My point is, just remember that it’ll seem to be happening very gradually and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll be caught by surprise by a sudden realization that we’re in a different era.
“I’m trying to make the case that you need to embrace this and start to integrate it into your work today,” Morelli said, “and one of the ways of doing this is through a term coined recently: ‘citizen developers.’ With AI tools, everyone can be a developer to some degree. Not to say that software engineers are going away, but now, with AI, you can build simple automations or customizations of the tools that you already use.”
To make the point, Morelli noted that a founder of OpenAI has said “English is the newest computer programming language,” since AI now makes it possible to give commands to computers in natural, spoken language.
Among the practical workplace uses of generative AI that Morelli shared with the working professionals gathered was customer research. He urged inputting a customer persona into “your AI tool of your choice,” then asking the AI platform “tons of questions” to be answered based on the persona created.
“For example, I could create the persona of an HR leader at a mid-market company of a certain size, going through certain types of challenges,” Morelli said. “Then, I could talk about how Jonathan and I are starting an AI for HR consulting and training company called Workplace Labs, and we’re focusing on HR leaders.
I can ask it tons of questions to give me initial feedback, an initial reaction to our landing page copy, or maybe there are some questions or challenges we haven’t really uncovered. It could help us empathize with our target customer persona better or maybe better identify our audience.”
Other useful personas?
Your boss—for reviewing and improving work before handing it over to your real-life boss. A prospective client—for assessing the persuasive power of a report or email intended to pursue business. An editor—to review and improve written content.
From the pair’s work to establish an AI for HR consultancy, Morelli said they are taking an approach inspired by “product development.”
“On a product team, the focus is on the jobs to be done by the target user,” he said. “AI can help identify tasks within a broad range of HR functions, then we can experiment with more advanced prompts. This is a good practical step to take that can get AI involved that doesn’t take a lot of background knowledge.
“Through our consulting venture, we want to train people on a framework to walk them through it to identify use cases, primarily focusing on HR.”
One of the most likely use cases—AI as a tool to quickly and efficiently create job descriptions—was demonstrated by Flower. He created a hypothetical “software engineer at Microsoft” description using ChatGPT 4.0 and a “prompt template” he developed for the task.
Flower interacted with the platform to have it revise language to enhance the importance of innovation to the job mission. And to have it add an opening paragraph stating “Microsoft is a global leader committed to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more”—that ChatGPT retrieved from a Microsoft website at his direction.
Or, as he put it, “Rather than simply spitting out an entire job description, it can guide you, summarize the research, and ask you questions to help you in refining the job description.”
The pair’s presentation also highlighted several powerful AI tools:
- Gamma: Presentation creation
- Perplexity: Instant answers with source links
- Nomic AI‘s GPT4all: Free, local, private AI chat for Windows and Mac
- RecurseChat: ($10 fee) local, private AI chat for Mac
- Hex‘s Magic AI: Transform data analysis with AI
Their suggested websites for locating even more useful AI tools:
- https://www.futuretools.io/
- https://www.producthunt.com/categories/ai
- https://theresanaiforthat.com
- https://www.theneuron.ai/top-tools
Next in the CHAIN series is the “AI Landscape,” on Nov. 13. Click HERE for more information and to register.