Yes, I’ve reached that point in my conversations about AI. I won’t mention any names (don’t worry, don’t be afraid), but more than one person has said to me: ‘Nelson, I’m not going to ask you which AI to use anymore because you always answer me with another question: what do you want it for? And of course, I get confused. But now that I know what I want it for, what do I do? Do I hand everything over to the AI and it does everything by itself?‘ And this is where the fun begins… ’Nelson, I want the AI to answer the questionnaires by itself.’ And I, with my best poker face: ’Of course, because the AI is a fortune teller, magical and knows everything! Easy!
‘ And I start firing away… Are the questions in these questionnaires structured? Do they have a pattern, a standard, a clear format? Are the questions repeated? Where do we get the answers from? From thin air? From the collective memory? From a document? Who is the owner of that document? And who is in charge of keeping it up to date?
‘Nelson, stop it! How can you ask me so many questions?! I thought the AI did everything by itself?’ If only it were that simple. If the AI could do everything by itself, worry … because then we wouldn’t be needed. And yes, of course, in a transactional model, you can buy a licence and dedicate yourself to fine-tuning your prompt transaction by transaction, and that would be great if you think that with your contribution alone you are going to change everything, but is that the case? Do you work alone doing that? Or do you work in a team with other colleagues who would also benefit from what you manage to do with the AI?
Business solutions
When we talk about business solutions, that does NOT scale. It’s not just about ‘throwing out ideas’. It’s about sitting down and thinking: – What do I really want to achieve? – How do I want it? – What do I have and what do I need to achieve that minimum viable solution? And while we’re at it, think, do I really want all my employees to start learning how to create prompts now? As if they didn’t already have enough to do, right?
I see two dimensions here. Individually, each person can improve their productivity through prompt engineering and that’s not bad, but at an organisational level. So thinking about all this very carefully, and here too AI helps us in our ideation processes if we are very lost, but after this and then, and only then, come back and look for me.
In the meantime, let’s keep riding this AI wave! And remember what I always say: Help AI so that AI can help you!
