Analyst To AI

I am fortunate in that my employer has provided resources to all employees to learn about AI. I believe the intention of it, which is not a bad idea, is to let staff become comfortable with it and learn how to use it it their jobs.

There are resources available for employers. Mine uses one called Sidecar (this is not a paid advertisement or endorsement, it’s just what we’re using).

 One of the first modules I watched was one about prompting. Prompting drives the the AI results. It’s pretty cool, by asking questions and continuing to drill down using more details, it will eventually lead to a useful answer. For instance, I ask to write a letter to accounting firms for an RFP (actually happened), I’ll say “I’m a Director of Finance at a Not for Profit, and I need a RFP letter to send to audit firms to replace my existing firm” it created a letter that we used as a reference for the final letter that we prepared and sent out. AI isn’t (or wasn’t at the time) sophisticated enough for us to trust it as the final draft. Or perhaps we didn’t prompt it properly as I was still learning that concept. In any event, AI is a tool for efficiency but it still needs human intervention.

As a side note, I used it to create the blog name based on criteria of why I was writing it. Understanding the prompting concept was pretty helpful to get my head around AI.

This is a link to an article that explains the basics pretty well. I reference this when writing this post to supplement what I learned using the resource at work.

https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/basics/effective-prompts/

Please share your experience