I was selected to participate in the Artificial Intelligence for Business Mini MBA program run by Spark and US edtech startup Section. Spark funded his 150-place $5,000 course to help participants leverage her AI to envision their business.
With Spark's consent, we will report back to BusinessDesk on what we learn each week. This is editorial content – Spark doesn’t pay for it – but Spark does fund my course presentations and also pays for advertising to promote these articles.
coming weeks
First of all, let's talk about Division Chief Executive Greg Schob We talk about what artificial intelligence (AI) means for business and how we're using it to second-guess boards.
Then, in the course itself, every Friday we will cover:
- Week 1: AI use cases and their three personas: Author, Assistant, and Strategist.How to write even more custom instructions and other clever things
- Week 2: Use AI as a thought partner. How AI can improve research and act as the devil's advocate for strategy.
- Week 3: Overview of goals and workflows to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality on all fronts.
- Week 4: Put it all into practice and learn how to design a cue-desire-response habit loop.
This section was founded in 2019 by New York University Stern professor, entrepreneur, and Mr. B.Bestselling author Scott Galloway Destroying expensive business school education.
It's now run by serial entrepreneur Schaub, who says, “AI is like testosterone to my brain.” The CEO of the same section said he is 62 years old and wants to grow the company for up to 10 years while creating an inheritance of US$10 million (NZ$16.5 million) for his children and grandchildren. .
He says his brain becomes less plastic as he ages, and AI could supercharge his declining gray matter. But until recently, the predominant emotion associated with AI was anxiety.
'Blind spot'
Now it's time for excitement.
He says tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Co-Pilot can be thought partners.
“As leaders, I think we all have blind spots. AI has fewer blind spots than we do. It can cross domains, disciplines, countries and time zones.
“If you're using an AI as a thought partner, you're probably just using it as a way to bounce ideas off and challenge yourself, so you probably don't care too much about it always being factually accurate. I guess.”
He suggests asking the AI to disagree on a strategy or consider an idea from a different angle. You can also prompt them to reply with a different persona.
For example, you might say to the AI, “As the CFO of a publicly traded company, please critique this product development roadmap.”
Once you have that answer, ask the question again as the head of engineering, marketing director, or consumer.
Importantly, AI can now do all of this for about $20 per month on most services.
Employees can input presentations and strategy documents into AI tools for feedback to determine how managers, boards, and customers will react and what questions they might ask.
In this way, Schaub promised the board that he would increase productivity by 25% from a workforce of 30 by the end of the year. That doesn't mean cutting staff or working four-day weeks, he says.
That means employees can do more.
Board members should be proficient in AI and actively use tools like Co-Pilot and Claude. He believes Co-Pilot is the perfect AI tool for business analysis.
“I use AI to pretend to be a board and prepare for the board. Boards should use AI when getting plans, materials, updates, or investment memos.
“If I were a board member or a member of some kind of committee, I would use AI to get ready much more quickly before I go into a meeting.”
This allows board members to ask better questions and elevate the discussion, he says.
He did this with his board and compared its performance to various tools.
Does he think there will ever be a time when there will only be AI bosses or executives? “I don't. Real experience is important. Real intuition is important. Not every decision is obvious.” Not all decisions can be made from data and analysis.
“You need a combination of experience and intuition, and that comes from people. Generally speaking, you will continue to need boards, investors and teams.”
Shove believes the first industries to be significantly impacted by AI will be software development, including media, entertainment, and gaming.
AI can greatly improve productivity.
“I think this is a great moment for New Zealand.
“Getting started with AI is relatively quick and easy. It's just a mindset. It's not a skill, it's not a hard skill to develop.”
Schaub believes there is an opportunity for mid-sized companies, but he believes these companies feel at risk and lack the technical know-how.
He says early adopters of AI need to find quick wins, with marketing artifacts like websites, brochures, and social media posts being obvious candidates.
Next, he says, for businesses that are capturing customer feedback from NPS scores, surveys, and other data points, they should use AI to summarize and integrate this.
He's also seen and heard that small technical teams can see huge productivity gains when they start using tools like GitHub Copilot.
Shove also says that thought partnership with AI tools is invaluable for small and medium-sized businesses to analyze business decisions. He expects that $20 per month will give him a consistently high ROI.
The question he gets asked most often is, “How can I use AI?”
He believes slow-moving incumbents and startups will lose out in the AI race to faster-moving incumbents, those with the right attitude and ability to invest in the right internal projects.
He points people to a Harvard Business Review article about 100 use cases for AI.
Large companies with investment capital will be the winners in the AI race, he says, as long as they are proactive. He says what you have to do is:
- Get CEOs and executives to put AI into practice.
- Appoint a person responsible for generative AI. You need to be a business leader, not a technology leader, as AI vendors provision a lot of technology. This is about choosing the use case with the highest ROI.
- A steering committee is not required. Some rules are necessary, but they only slow people down.
- AI is most useful when it can load data. So you have to allow it.
- Establish a process or framework for analyzing AI use cases, starting with a workflow audit. Select the largest teams with the biggest pain points and easily perform a workflow audit.
- Next, establish a process for granting permission to pilots. Don't spend a lot of money on these pilots. After more than a month of testing, we will decide whether to roll it out to more people.
- Once AI is embedded in an organization, it will need to be incorporated into product roadmaps, and this is where technology leadership becomes even more important.
- Less ambition is a good thing in the short term. Technology is changing too fast to enable large-scale business transformations based on it. He said the industries most at risk need to be the first to transform. “That means we have to find a quick way to win.”