In response to a request we did for topics people are interested in us writing about, the wonderful Dami asked:
The business landscape today idolizes the ability to cut costs without disrupting business operations. It is a skill that’s highly valued by management. How do you market your services to prospective clients in an era where AI prompting can be skillfully utilized to analyze data and extract meaningful insights?
It’s a great AI question, and one we’ve been asked a few times by clients and prospects (so much so that we’ve started offering intro sessions and workshops to help businesses and organizations tackle AI and how to initiate AI projects in-house). So here’s our response, seasoned with copious amounts of my personal points of view! Let’s kick off with some context and a brief primer…
A false pretense
Let’s get one thing straight: I love the trajectory that AI is following right now. It’s helpful, fun, and innovative. Generative AI is doing a lot more a lot sooner than I would have expected five years ago. But there are a lot of misconceptions about its ability and capability. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and the like are all still essentially chat bots. They are skilled at natural language processing but lack higher order thinking or any semblance of cognitive ability.
There’s no doubt that some people are using generative AI to help them analyze data and come up with insights – but where that works best is when it’s in the hands of experienced analysts. This is for two reasons:
- Experienced analysts know what to look for and ask; they also know how to feed the bots to get useful info out.
- Most importantly though, experienced analysts can tell when they start getting errors or incorrect information.
Let me tell you a story…
Once upon a time, many many weeks ago a brilliant albeit time-poor analyst tried to use ChatGPT to document some analytics code written in Python. As all good bots do, ChatGPT complied and gave, at great length, detailed documentation of various functions and procedures. However, this analyst (let’s call them ‘P‘) noticed that there were some irregularities in ChatGPT’s interpretation of the code. “No worries,” says P, “it’s probably just GPT drift. I’ll just wipe the slate clean and start anew!” And so he did; but the new documentation was wrong too. And over the course of three hours, P came to realize that ChatGPT, while understanding the syntax and functionality of common code patterns, was completely unable to document the logic of a specific predictive algorithm.
The moral of the story is that if P wasn’t intimately familiar with predictive models and the higher-order logic, he never would have caught the error. This isn’t just true for writing technical documentation- those same risks apply to ANY job you ask a GPT bot to do. Remember: everything today’s AI chat bots do are based on the premise of regurgitating sensical patterns emulating data it’s been trained on, but it doesn’t actually “understand” the content. “Prompt engineering” cannot overcome the limitations of the technology, any more than changing the fuel you put in your car will make it more aerodynamic and take flight.
Back to Dami’s question
How do you market your services to prospective clients in an era where AI prompting can be skillfully utilized to analyze data and extract meaningful insights?
At Ones & Heroes™ we love AI and are betting long on the technology. We use it extensively in-house, as we’re integrating it into a lot of our internal tools to help improve our efficiency and capabilities. We’re also all pretty confident that none of us are going to be replaced by AI any time soon.
I’d challenge the idea that ChatGPT can give meaningful insights. I think it’s pretty great at consolidating observations, and maybe for brainstorming ideas *interactively* for insights, but it’s not coming up with “insights” on it’s own. I spend a lot of time with generative AI and I haven’t seen that yet. What you’d get from a “make me a list of insights from this data” prompt wouldn’t pass internal review/screening at Ones & Heroes™. Basically, if you could get it from ChatGPT it’s probably not on offer from us.
The other thing I’d say is that we really encourage our clients to use AI responsibly, with people (either us or in-house) who understand how to use it and make themselves more impactful on the business. We can help coach & train businesses, lead projects and architect large-scale solutions, and more (this post isn’t a pitch, so if you want to learn more about our capabilities definitely reach out to us).
So I guess the shorter answer is: we think about and talk about AI as augmentation to staff (ours or yours). Essentially, it’s power armor (like Iron Man!) that amplifies a skilled person’s ability to get things done faster and with higher fidelity. It’s not a replacement. So long as that’s true, we’ll continue to market ourselves as having some of the best power-armor in the market, and are willing to help you fit some for yourself!
