Actionable AI — Whiteboard Friday

So, diving right in. You know, using artificial intelligence, it’s really this assistive technology. Oftentimes, you’re not gonna get completely from A to Z, it might just get you about 60, 70% of the way there, and that’s okay, right? So kind of reframing AI as more of this assistive technology is really, really helpful.

The biggest word of warning

Ihave for everyone, and this overseas data happens to a lot of very smart people, it happens to a lot of inside teams, is you have these over-generalized ideas or tasks for AI. You sort of have this magical orb solution that you wanna use AI for. And unfortunately, when building things out and working with AI, you need to get really, really specific. You need to boil down your ideas into bite-sized tasks. So, you know, try not to fall into that trap.

And typically what ends up happening is this happens when people are overeager to incorporate AI into their products or their systems and company. And I’m hearing a lot of SEOs, a lot of marketers, feel that burden from upper management. And there’s a really neat opportunity for those of you experience that, to sort of manage up and help educate some of these stakeholders about what AI is qualified for and what it’s not qualified for. And to certainly bring these tasks a bit down to Earth, in terms of making them, you know, breaking them out into steps.

So what ends up happening is

people get frustrated when they try to do this, and it leads to feeling a bit defeated. And I don’t want that to happen to you, ’cause there’s a bunch of really great applications. I highlight a bunch of the things that Generative AI specifically is really qualified for in these blue asterisks around the board. And so to start to think about that, right? But this is an iterative experience. So again, don’t get discouraged if you don’t get it right on the first try. No one gets it right on the first try, I promise you.

When not to use AI
When to not use AI
And it’s okay to think up some tasks and ideas that you wanna experiment with AI with and not end up using AI. That’s okay, it’s part of the customer service chat: channels and best practices process. And in fact, so many AI researchers and teams I’ve worked on, we do that ourselves. And so that, again, that’s kind of part of the process, and don’t feel bad about that. Certainly, don’t stick an AI, you know, sticker onto something that you don’t use AI for. But to just be mindful of that.

I like to compare this

to throwing spaghetti against the wall. You know, see what sticks, see what doesn’t. Some of the noodles that don’t stick are things like task tracking, where you can have a heuristic model, do something like that. And all heuristic means is an, if this, then that. I know that was sort of, you know, this tool’s been around forever, but just that thought process, it’s sort of like a Decision Tree. If a Decision Tree could figure out your task, this is better asb directory suited for something, a different type of solution. And that’s okay.

Identifying high Click-Through Rate Pages. I’ve heard several people wanting to use AI for that. AI isn’t required to do this, right? A simple Pivot Table would get you that information quickly, and you know, not cost as much money.