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The idea of a robot version of yourself taking over the drudgery of your job while you are playing video games or watching TV is pretty appealing. But can AI really replace an employee? We’re pretty sure the answer is no. At least not yet. When we talk to other business owners, a common theme we hear is that we all have many creative people we enjoy working with who are doing good work for our business. The problem is that they're spending a huge amount of their time doing work that they don’t like. Small businesses especially ask employees to wear a lot of hats, and they don’t always love the hats they have to put on. Often, roles like data entry or content creation go unfilled because there isn’t a person to fill them. These roles can be ideal for an AI “employee”. The simplest solution is to use AI automation to minimize the drudge jobs and help your employees do more of what they like. Using AI to fill the jobs you can’t find a [...]

A recent Gartner report stated that 61% of modern B2B buyers prefer to buy without human contact. That means more and more business owners are negotiating complicated, nuanced business interactions without talking to a person. Imagine you have a landscaping company and you are buying a new fleet of trucks. You can go online and research all of the features and specs. You can see what other field service owners are using and read reviews. You can make a decision: these are the trucks I need. Are you going to call the company to place an order? The trends say probably not. Any business with a sales line has seen call volume drop to a trickle compared to what it was 10 years ago. When you call a salesperson, it will take time, and they will try to upsell you or sell you the warranty. Why spend all that time when all you want to do is type in your credit card number and finish the transaction, because you’ve already made your decision.  As a business owner, your [...]

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 [...]

Imagine that you give an employee a pamphlet with instructions about how to operate a machine. They read the pamphlet, and now they have that information or context before they try to use the machine. You can do the same thing with your AI; its called retrieval augmented generation.