Before AI adoption at your organization is a technology problem, it’s actually a people problem. When your organization tries to adopt AI, the first step isn’t to just pick a platform and start using it. (Unless you’re an organization of one person! Lucky you!) At a very high level, the steps are more like this: First, … Continue reading AI is a People Problem First
Category: Artificial Intelligence AI
The State of AI in Business
(This is a follow-up post to The State of AI in Practice.) The internet (or at least my neighborhood of it) is blowing up over the recent MIT study that finds: "Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return." The … Continue reading The State of AI in Business
The State of AI in Practice
We spend a lot of time reading about AI, but most coverage focuses on new model launches, press releases from big companies, and industry drama, not the practical, day-to-day use cases and lessons we’re all searching for. At NU, we’ve been running Practical AI training sessions to fill that gap. We’ve done over 30 sessions, … Continue reading The State of AI in Practice
From Speaking to a Completed Task with AI
This strategy document from OpenAI on their 2025 plans is a must-read if you're interested in the state of AI. This document and the new Connectors features released by OpenAI are just more evidence of the future we’re moving towards across the industry where AI Assistants, built by OpenAI / ChatGPT and others, will plug … Continue reading From Speaking to a Completed Task with AI
AI Assistants Do Your Work for You
AI assistants are becoming our digital coworkers. They're doing tasks for us that we used to do ourselves. Much of their value will come from their ability to use computers, browsers, and APIs to do things outside of their environment, by using MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. AI assistants rely on MCP servers to let … Continue reading AI Assistants Do Your Work for You
AI Chatbot Organizes the Revolution Against Its Creator
We built an AI chatbot to answer everyone’s questions about our upcoming offsite meeting. We uploaded documents and spreadsheets with the agenda, travel information, schedules, and other materials. It’s working great. However, below is the first conversation someone had with the chatbot (with a very little poetic license taken). Valuable? Yes. Hilarious? Definitely. Insubordinate? Clearly. … Continue reading AI Chatbot Organizes the Revolution Against Its Creator
Testing AI Note Taking Software
I've been testing AI note-takers, and they’re pretty incredible. One tool I’ve been having success with is Granola. It’s easy to use and excellent at creating meeting summaries. A few lessons I’ve learned so far for getting the most out of your AI note-taker: The default meeting notes are great, but using a custom notes … Continue reading Testing AI Note Taking Software
OpenAI Operator Early Experiments
OpenAI Operator ordered a computer monitor on Amazon for someone on my team! Here’s the prompt: ----- Order the LG 29WP60G-B monitor from Amazon. Ship it to: INSERT NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE Use the default credit card on the account. Just add the monitor to the cart, no need to ask for confirmation. You can also … Continue reading OpenAI Operator Early Experiments
Courses: Practical AI
NYCOO offers a course called "Practical AI" that is an interactive session on how to use AI in your day-to-day work. We cover prompting best practices, an in-depth demo of ChatGPT’s features and capabilities with a variety of examples and use cases, how to build custom GPTs, agents, and tools, how to use agents, assistants, … Continue reading Courses: Practical AI
Writing for Consumption by AI not Humans
The Batch from Andrew Ng and DeepLearning.ai is one of the better AI newsletters out there. In this issue, he talks about how "people are posting text online that’s intended for direct consumption not by humans, but by LLMs (large language models)." I find myself doing this all the time with our internal documentation. People … Continue reading Writing for Consumption by AI not Humans
Saving Hours with AI Task Automation
To find ways to automate our work with AI and other technologies, we talk about how our team spends their time and what kinds of manual, time-consuming tasks we do. We realized that we were spending hours a week copying and pasting data from emails into our database of profiles. One of us would receive … Continue reading Saving Hours with AI Task Automation
Fine-Tuning FTW!
We fine-tuned our first AI model and it was magical! We wanted to feed unstructured legal contracts into a model and extract structured data to enter into our database, instead of having to do that manually. Seemed like a perfect job for AI. We started by iterating on our prompt to see how far we … Continue reading Fine-Tuning FTW!
3 Tips for Using RAG to Build an AI Internal Support Tool
Employees have questions. Many of the answers are somewhere in our company documents: handbook, wiki, expense policy, file system, list of important documents, and so on. Before AI, to answer their own questions, our team would have to search those documents manually. When searching a document for the answer, the person had to know the … Continue reading 3 Tips for Using RAG to Build an AI Internal Support Tool
Quick Tip on Building AI Products
Chat interfaces are fun and easy to use, but to get the most value from AI, you need to build a system with various subsystems that use the right tool for the task, including using different AI models and fine-tunings, RAG, traditional code, and more.I've seen this when building internal tools. Before I employ AI, … Continue reading Quick Tip on Building AI Products
5 Tips on How to Get Everyone at Your Company Using AI
The use cases for AI are countless and growing, so finding use cases is actually easy (ask AI if you need ideas!). The hard part is executing to make AI adoption happen at your company. Here are five tips on how to get everyone at your company using AI: 1. Create the Culture Create a … Continue reading 5 Tips on How to Get Everyone at Your Company Using AI
You’re Not Spending Enough On Internal Tools
Looking back at the organizations I’ve worked at, I realize now that few of them spent sufficient resources on internal tools for our teams to be faster and better at their jobs. In the past, the lack of focus on those tools wasn’t a good thing, but it also wasn’t usually a large enough competitive … Continue reading You’re Not Spending Enough On Internal Tools
Resources for Startup Operators 