AI Demystified for Executives
Ever wish you had a coach to help you decipher the AI buzz and hype so you could make better-informed business decisions about what, when, and why to use AI in your business? You'll get that when you tune into the AI Demystified for Executives podcast.
Andrew bridges the gap between complex AI concepts and practical business applications. With experience in both large corporations and high-growth startups, he excels at communicating with business and technical teams alike. As an author, industry thought leader and international speaker, Andrew serves as your trusted advisor and coach on this AI journey.
AI doesn't have to be complicated!
Here is what you can expect from this podcast:
We'll explore a monthly theme with specific topics each week. You'll also receive a free cheat sheet or guide for reference.
In each podcast, our goal is to ensure that you walk away understanding:
- One key AI concept
- Its business applicability
- An actionable takeaway
Our Monday episodes are 7-10 minutes long, perfect for getting up to speed on the week's most important "aha" moments during your commute or while sipping your morning coffee or tea.
On Wednesdays, our episodes run 30-40 minutes, providing a deeper dive into the week's topic. (Maybe a bit much if you're driving!)
Once a month, during the Wednesday podcast, we'll host an interview with either a business or technical professional related to the monthly theme.
AI Demystified for Executives
#1: Why AI is reshaping the competitive landscape
"AI Demystified for Executives" kicks off its series on Strategic Foundations of AI for Business Leaders. In this inaugural episode, host Andrew Psaltis explores why AI is reshaping the competitive landscape.
Key points covered:
- The impact of GPT technology beyond chatbots
- How AI can revolutionize document processing and analysis
- Real-world examples of AI application in business contexts
- Potential risks of disruption for traditional document-processing services
- Opportunities for streamlining operations in various industries
- The importance of understanding AI's potential applications in your business
Andrew discusses how AI tools can dramatically reduce time-to-insight and decision-making processes, potentially shifting from days to minutes. He encourages listeners to identify areas in their businesses where AI could be leveraged, even if not immediately implemented.
Tune in to gain valuable insights on how AI is transforming the business landscape and how you can prepare your organization for this technological shift.
Microsoft 2023 Annual Report
Dragonfly Rinsings School of Data proudly presents the AI Demystified for Executives podcast.
This month's theme is Strategic Foundations of AI for Business Leaders, and this week's topic is Why is AI reshaping the competitive landscape? I'm your host, Andrew Psaltis. This is our first podcast, recorded live from my home studio on Monday, October 14th, 2024.
Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, everyone has been in a frenzy over what the technology can do. ChatGPT's core technology, Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), allows it to understand and generate text that mimics human language. On the surface, you may cast this away as a fad or just another Chatbot. Let’s move past the Chat part of ChatGPT and look at how the underlying technology GPT can reshape the competitive landscape for many businesses.
Let’s consider the competitive situation in which a product or service becomes obsolete. This can be your company or one of your vendors. One example we can all relate to is document processing. Regardless of the types you often work with—legal, financial, invoices, RFPs, contracts, or any other type of document—I don’t know about you, but there have been many times I’ve wanted to pull my hair out while dealing with them.
For this example, let’s pretend that we are on a team and asked to summarize an annual report for a cone of our customers concisely and clearly and identify key market trends and takeaways. If you’re unfamiliar with an annual report, that is OK; I’ve included a link to Microsoft’s 2023 annual report in the description.
How long would this take? Hours, days, a week?
Using any of the GPT-based products on the market - ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot, or Google’s Gemini, you can do this in less than one minute and also have it generate a short memo to send to our team.
I’m sure you have heard or experienced firsthand that these things can hallucinate and make up information. If you’re unfamiliar with this, hallucinating is when these models generate incorrect or misleading information that sounds factual. This is a very active research area with many emerging strategies to overcome it. One, in particular, is that we are giving it the content to analyze. This is called providing the context; you can think about the context in this situation the same way you would if we were to enjoy a coffee together and conversation in a beautiful cafe; our context would be the cafe. For the model, the financial document is the context. This technology is still evolving, very fast but still evolving, so it’s still a good idea to sanity-check its output still. At times it’s best to think of this as a virtual assistant.
Do you sell a product or service that uses human labor to process documents? If so, you should closely examine how you can use this technology to streamline your processes, as there is a significant risk of disruption.
Do you manage a physical store or perhaps a chain? If so, this technology can help you improve your handling of invoices and contracts. Could you benefit from being able to streamline finding discrepancies in invoices or summarizing contracts? You can also consider using it to draft contracts for you.
In general, think of where in your business you can reduce the time it takes to go from either documents to insights or create new documents, such as a draft contract. What would it mean to your business to be able to make decisions in near real-time instead of hours or days? I’d encourage you to examine where in your business you can start to think about using this technology; even if you decide you’re not ready, it’s essential to understand where it could be used and the why and why not.
If you want to explore this topic further, please tune in to episode #2, which examines this in more detail. That's all for now.