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So far Becka Rahn has created 4 blog entries.

Blocked by a blank page? Train Your AI to help you go from struggling creator to curator.

No matter what field your business serves, there are tasks we all have in common: the need to create content for presentations to generate sales or report to an invested constituency. You have the data and the templates created by your designer, but the perpetual struggle is how to get past that first blank page.  Why not ask ChatGPT to make the slides for you? Realistically, AI isn’t great at generating slideshows yet. It doesn't always understand visual data, like graphs and charts, or how to fit information into a graphic template. It looks for patterns it recognizes and might skip over important details specific to your business. But you can train the AI how to help you get past that blank page syndrome. First, give your AI some key context to help it succeed: upload a slideshow template that you have already created and the notes about what you want to talk about. In our last blog post, we introduced the idea of augmented generation to give your AI access to specific and relevant information. Then give [...]

By |2025-10-14T14:26:55-05:00October 21, 2025|

How can you make your chatbot better? The answer is Retrieval Augmented Generation

You might have heard horror stories about companies that have replaced their help desk team with an out-of-the-box AI chatbot system. But much to the frustration of customers, generic chatbots can give generic answers.  Here’s a great example from one of our readers: “I was looking for a replacement part for my sewing machine on the manufacturer’s website. I couldn’t find the information, so I asked their Live Chat Bot a question. The answer it gave me was to go search the manufacturer's website I was already at.” When chatbots are built, they start by feeding the AI all of the information it can get access to, indexing every website, manual, book or pdf it can find. This is a very time-consuming process. So, one problem with training an AI this way is that it can only generate answers based on the information it has at the time. The entire AI model is based on that training data, so if a new piece of information is added, the training must start again from scratch. This is why many [...]

By |2025-09-21T19:55:58-05:00October 7, 2025|

Five Simple Ways to Start Using AI in your Business

Like with many new technologies, there’s a lot of confusion about how to use AI in your business and especially where to get started. Here are our 5 tips for practical things you can implement today to introduce AI into your business. Encourage your team to play. AI tools can be fun to interact with. For many years, using computers for your job has been mostly spreadsheets and boring data entry. With AI it can instead feel like you're talking to a coworker who is happy to help you out. Give your team permission to spend 15-30 minutes of their day just using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to see if it can do something for them. For example, if you're writing marketing content, see if it can give you a starting outline, write a headline, or help you brainstorm a list like this one.  Choose an AI champion. Find someone on your team who is excited about AI and encourage them to really dig deep. Give them time to experiment, to try to solve their own problems, [...]

By |2025-09-21T19:44:31-05:00September 23, 2025|

AI Word of the Day: Agentic

You may have heard the word “agent” or “agentic” when talking about AI, especially with the new ChatGPT agentic model that was released in June 2025. But what does “agentic” actually mean?  Merriam-Webster defines agentic this way: someone or something capable of achieving outcomes independently (“functioning like an agent”) or possessing such ability, means, or power. When you are talking about an “agentic AI”, that means it's not just chatting with you, but is empowered as an agent to take action in the real world. An agent can do things like navigate websites, filter results, prompt you to log in securely when needed, conduct analysis, and even deliver editable slideshows and spreadsheets that summarize its findings.  When demonstrating the new ChatGPT agent model, Sam Altman and his crew at OpenAI showed how it could do a complex task like making travel bookings. Another great example was ordering cupcakes for an office party by giving the AI agent the dietary requirements and budget for it to research and order the cupcakes.  We think a key thing to note, however, [...]

By |2025-09-16T14:07:32-05:00September 16, 2025|
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