I'm taking part in an intensive “mini-MBA” course on Artificial Intelligence run by Spark and US EdTech startup Section, and each week over the next month I'll outline what I'm learning.
Last week we spoke with Section CEO Greg Shove about how his business uses AI and what impact it will have on the business world at large – you can read the article here.
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During the first official week of the program, I learned about different use cases and personas for AI, and also learned that some AI tools are better at certain tasks than others.
I signed up with Claude from Anthropic and BusinessDesk's parent company, NZME, announced that all staff now have access to Microsoft's Copilot within our secure walled garden.
This means that in addition to your existing OpenAPI account (for ChatGPT), you will have access to three AI tools. Many instructors recommended Claude as the best tool for business-oriented tasks. All of them suggested using multiple AI tools.
A lot of what I'm learning is using AI for the first draft of almost everything, and then having a human review it.
Section's Edmundo Ortega took a course on the three personas he uses when working with AI (he uses them a lot): These days, he no longer writes first drafts himself, but instead has ChatGPT or another AI do it for him.
As for hallucinations (those created by AI), Ortega said they're not necessarily a bad thing. For some tasks, being creative is a good thing. But when precision is required, just ask the AI for sources, check multiple tools, and tell it not to make things up.
Ortega detailed the three personas the AI is tasked with depending on the task at hand.
assistant
- Summarize technical and academic papers.
- Generate reports from the data.
- Take notes and prepare for meetings.
- Learn technical skills.
- Things like examining credit card statements or “understanding what's going on in my teenage daughter's mind.”
Strategist
- Think through complex plans.
- Role-play conversations with customers or your boss.
- Critique the presentation and talking points.
- Explore a dataset and learn how to evaluate and analyze it.
- Improve your resume and cover letter.
- On a personal level, it can also help you learn Italian and work as a therapist (see pi.ai).
creator
- Generate content in your own voice, whether it be blog posts, social media, or email campaigns.
- Draft project briefs and product specifications.
- Review the website and write a press release about it.
- Draft employee reviews, development plans, and onboarding documentation.
- Write an outline for just about anything.
One of the coolest things I saw was when ChatGPT generated a press release using a screenshot of a website landing page, which was an amazing achievement.
Ortega said AI is best suited for repetitive tasks (high human power) and tasks that require a lot of thinking (high brain power).
Chase Ballard, the Section’s AI expert, offered insightful guidance on how to best leverage AI. He suggested:
- Preparation: Define your use cases.
- Prompt: Get initial output.
- Polish: Refine your output.
This makes sense to me: no matter what tool I was using, it usually took me multiple tries to get close to the answer I was looking for. Having Claude create fake marketing personas that described people who would want to subscribe to a news publication, or (horror) cancel their subscription, and their reasons for doing so, produced great results.
I also tried to create an image in Copilot of a newspaper editor wearing a crown made of newspaper, and although it looked fine, I repeatedly instructed the editor not to have a beard, and I just couldn't envision the aesthetic.
Ballard recommended the Prompt Question Framework, which provides building blocks for crafting questions: task description, role, bounded context, specific requirement, and reasoning. An example is shown above.
And in a presentation by marketer and author Shiv Singh, he suggested that everyone should be actively planning to use AI as a co-pilot in their careers — not as a way to cut costs, but as a way to augment and improve productivity.
Don't forget to make sure all your data is protected.
Singh had something interesting to say about brand propositions in the age of AI.
- You need to make your brand better so it is harder to be copied by AI.
- With the internet awash in synthetic data, making your brand more human will be key. (NZME is already seeing this, as it considers how to promote its 300-plus journalists at a time when the use of AI tools is commoditizing so much news.)
- Attach your brand to an emotional benefit. Humans still run the world (for now), so appeal to human emotions.
- Not just performance marketing, but marketing in a way that resonates with your customers. Pay-per-click advertising on Google and Facebook is available to everyone. You need to build empathy for your brand.
Singh also said companies needed to engage in better customer research, including “synthetic panels.”
If you have customer survey data or comments about your product from social media like TikTok, you can upload that and ask the AI to create personas for you. Then, you can let the AI tool run a panel for 10 minutes and ask the personas questions. Once that's done, you can ask the panel yourself.
The only way to test this is to compare it to a real panel, but the more data you feed it in, the more likely it is to be accurate.
Finally, Shin points out that creativity will always be important — AI-generated ideas and art can sometimes feel bland and artificial — but there's still hope for journalism.
series
Articles are published every Friday:
- Week 0: Section CEO Greg Shove talks about the impact of AI.
- Week 1: See above.
- Week 2 (next week): Leverage AI as a thought partner. How AI can improve research and be a strategic voice.
- Week 3: Outline goals and workflows to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality in all areas.
- Week 4: Put it all into practice and learn how to design a “habit loop with a cue, a craving and a response.”
Spark has recruited 150 participants for a $5,000 course to help participants create an AI-powered vision for their business.
This is editorial content and Spark is not paying for it, however Spark does pay for the placement of my course and also pays for advertising to promote these articles.
Finally, here's another AI image I created with Copilot. I requested a harbor bridge with a city in the background. The shot was great, but had a lot of unnecessary elements.
