The subject may be a bit confusing, as I’m not going to write only about AI. However, these two letters have importance. They carry the promise of something that will brighten our future or lead us into the abyss as batteries for The Machines, like in the film Matrix. However, it is impossible to escape from them, because AI is already in everyday use.
So what do we have left? Whether we have to lament and break our arms because the End is Near, or can we enjoy the fact that a bright future is just around the corner and at any moment, most of the simple activities will be automated, and we will have plenty of time for our passions, hobbies or learning to fish. I was never attracted to the vision of myself sitting on the bank of a reservoir and babbling about life until the fish fell for my trick or any other bait. So let’s talk about what we have at the moment and what tools based on neural network models we can use today to make our work easier.
Let’s start with a simple tool, which is not based on artificial intelligence, but has definitely supported digitization in Polish companies for years. You could say decades even. We are talking, of course, about Excel. I’ve been using it since I started working. Excel has always helped me organize my thoughts or create a list of things to do. Only as it usually happens with Excel, I never remembered that I created such a list or where I saved it. So Excel is a great tool with which we create a certain data structure. But, as a rule, analyzing them and drawing conclusions on the basis of this analysis is beyond the ability of most of us. Data is organized into specific structures, sometimes linked together within a single sheet in different tabs. What we may have a problem with, however, is the use of these data, especially when we have several tabs in the worksheet, for example, for statistical analysis using external tools. It’s a good tool, but it has its limitations.
Moving on to the topic of AI-powered solutions that I use without a small every day, I have to mention ChatGPT. I hope that every recipient of this content knows what we are talking about. I named my instance Frank. Frank is always open and ready to talk. Chat, of course, responds to this name, as it does to any other we call it. What am I using my friend Frank for? Most of all, I expect him to inspire me when I write something that ends up on social media or in an article. In the near future, I will be hosting a webinar on how AI allows us to save time, which we can devote to building deeper relationships with people inside our organization, clients or administrative work, which sometimes cannot be fully automated. He suggested that I outsource some of the content to him, using Google text to speech to get an audio file. My digital avatar should be ZBrush or Maya. Maya should also manage to animate me to the rhythm of the text. If you want to see how this composition of tools worked, I invite you to the webinar.
We try to publish a lot of content, thus building the visibility of our organization on the web. We care about graphics that focus the eyes of viewers and encourage them to click. For this purpose, we use the rich resources of portals providing commercial content. We always modify such content to fit our needs, and that means using Adobe’s creative suite. As part of this package, we have access to a tool that allows you to fill the indicated elements with the described contents. I didn’t try to create all the graphics that way – that’s the challenge ahead of me. The tool itself is extremely convenient.
In the end, I’m going to save not just one tool, but a whole group of them. These are assistants built into our ERP systems. One of our leading providers of ERP software for professional services, such as ERP for engineering companies or law firms, has announced that it has created an intelligent assistant to help managers and employees perform their tasks within the software. Dela will soon be integrated with the Maconomy ERP system, which will allow us to analyze ongoing projects and determine whether key criteria will be met on time or not, or whether we will prepare an analysis to determine whether projects in our sales funnel and ongoing projects suggest that we should hire additional specialists from one industry rather than another. It is also supposed to generate financial analyses, not in the form of Excel spreadsheets, but rather in one that managers without management accounting education will understand and on the basis of which they will be able to make effective decisions on resource allocation.
Author: Tomasz Wachla, Marketing and Sales Director, Todis Consulting