AI - Use what's in front of you instead of figuring out where you're going.

Dawid Naude, Director, Pathfindr

The first step your company should take is learning how to use ChatGPT properly. Very few do.

There’s a lot of talk of AI, and businesses need to start tinkering right away. There is a huge opportunity accessible right now, right in front of you. You can completely automate processes with autonomous agents, have all your content created automatically for your learning management platform, and even enable the equivalent of a data science team with a few clicks.

This is all exciting, and instead of diving in most leaders are overwhelmed with where to start, or they’re busy diving into strategy sessions, working groups and engaging consulting partners to make it a reality. One month goes by, then 6, then 18, and you’re basically where you started with the exception of “we encourage the use of AI, our staff are allowed to use ChatGPT”, but they haven’t invested in training, a secure environment or support channels.

Note - there are high risk industries that need to get this right. If you’re dealing with children, national infrastructure, mental health or other vulnerable groups - it’s completely appropriate to get it 100% right instead of learn from mistakes. There have been and will be many comical newspaper headlines about AI blunders.

But if you’re not in those groups, instead of diving into AI by spending millions on strategy, custom implementation and an army of consultants, first use what’s already right in front of you. (by the way, as Australia’s leading AI innovation studio, we’re happy to do your strategy, implementation and bring a modest crew of consultants if you like).

Where to start tinkering when you don’t know where to start?

1) Buy ChatGPT Teams or Enterprise for your company. If you have less than 100 staff, buy the Teams licence, if you have more, consider the Enterprise one. ChatGPT Teams is $25 per user per month, you only need 30 minutes of productivity increase per month to pay for itself. Go for the monthly plan, it gives you an easy out (makes the business case easier to get over the line).

2) Teach all of your staff how to configure “custom instructions”. These allow you to tailor it specific to each person, describe who you are, your job function, your location and your interests. It’s the first thing ChatGPT looks at before giving a response. If you tell it you’re in sales and you ask about AI, it’ll tell you how it’ll help you sell, or how can sell AI. If you tell it you’re in risk management, it’ll respond with all the risk considerations by default.

3) Configure your official company GPT’s. Think of this as your local app store. It’s templated ‘bots’ that ChatGPT called “GPTs” (terrible name) that take away the need to have long instructions to ChatGPT. You could have your official company jargon buster GPT called “Jargy”, that allows you to go “@Jargy - what does ADIN mean” and it’ll tell you what your company definition is. Or you create tools, say “@MemoMary can you create meeting minutes based on xyz” and it’ll output it in a standard company format. Or do the same for writing user stories, a sales briefing, etc.

4) Pick official business unit champions and get them to create business unit GPT’s. The next level is to have teams create GPT’s for their specific groups. You could have a few official ones for Marketing that would output the tone of voice that your company has - the GPT is already configured with examples of how to sound and not sound. Your sales team could have a sales meeting prep GPT that asks you all the questions a customer is likely to ask, and you can simulate your standard responses.

5) Within each business unit, train everyone how to create their own GPT’s. The next layer down is enabling everyone to be able to create their own GPT’s and share what’s working for them.

6) Go beyond text. Use it to review data, create data, and construct rich visualisations. You can take it much further, but that’s a good start.

7) Create a space to share feedback, and incentivise it. Have a slack channel, a yammer group (or whatever it’s called now) or something else where people can share all the amazing ways they’re using it, reward them and have quarterly spotlights.

8) Get some help if you need it. Get someone to do it with you or for you, give a dedicated support channel, ‘office hours’ and enablement sessions to show and help people how to use these tools.

9) Create acceptable use guidelines. It shouldn’t be long, it shouldn’t be scary, it should be accessible, easy and simple. “Don’t use it to write customer communication without checking it first; use it for inspiration; use it to critique but not create contracts” etc.

Simply telling people that they’re encouraged to use their own ChatGPT, at their own cost, and not put sensitive information in it isn’t taking AI seriously or strategically.

Once you get into the spirit of using ChatGPT or MS Copilot of Gemini properly, then you can go beyond.

It’s time to get stuck in and tinkering, or reflect on why you think you should wait.