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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 [...]

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 [...]