We all know them. Those little things that disrupt your day and make business harder than it needs to be. In our Creature Discomforts campaign, we visualize these little struggles using our animated creatures, and show how Lenovo Pro helps you overcome them.
In this 6-part series, we look at the overwhelming feeling that comes along with the emergence of a new business disruption trend, in this case: AI. The AI Revolution is coming, and the most successful businesses will be those who learn AI and understand how it can help them achieve unimagined levels of productivity and efficiency. This written series provides you an entry point into learning about the current AI landscape and shows how you can use robots to overcome those Creature Discomforts.
Part 1: Getting Started with AI
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has scarcely been out of the news for almost 18 months. Tools like ChatGPT have been celebrated as potential workplace saviors one moment and dismissed as marketing hot air the next. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between.
Generative AI is growing more capable every month but, as it stands today it can be enormously helpful for many office tasks. If you’re running a multinational corporation, the aggregate benefits could be sizeable. For the typical small or medium enterprise, generative AI is likely to help your staff perform many tasks, more quickly. Think of it as a smart intern whose work should be checked carefully.
This is the first of a series of articles exploring how to get the most out of generative AI. We’ll begin by considering what generative AI is, how it works, and take an overview of some of the things it could do in your business.
Part 2: A Deep Dive Into ChatGPT
Most people would like to have an assistant to help with everyday work tasks and that’s exactly what artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT promise. They can summarize documents, draft emails, carry out research and much more. As we discussed in the previous article in this series, they are not ‘intelligent’ in the way a human assistant is, so their work needs to be checked for mistakes. Even so, they can save you a lot of time.
In this article we’ll focus on some of the uses for language-processing chatbots. I’ll refer to ChatGPT throughout but there are alternatives, such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and Meta’s LLaMa. Most of these offer a free basic service and charge a subscription for their most powerful AI model or for some other upgrade. Whichever you use, the first six ideas below will be applicable. The last two - the App Store and image generation - are specific to ChatGPT.
Part 3: An Introduction to Prompt Engineering
Perhaps the most significant thing about generative artificial intelligence (AI), is the chat interface. There were AI tools before ChatGPT became public in November 2022 but working with them required programming skills or a more limited user interface. By allowing any user to enter text in natural language, ChatGPT made AI accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Other tools soon unveiled similar interfaces.
These tools are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) because they are trained to analyse and find patterns in masses of written data. They use that data to produce new text and understand user queries, known as ‘prompts’. Although LLMs will do their best with any input, better prompts get better results.
Part 4: Using AI for Imagery
If you need images for your social media campaign or website but you can’t find what you want on stock image sites, then generative artificial intelligence can help. With a little practice, you can get an AI to produce all kinds of images for you.
If you have been following this series, then you will probably have experimented with large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. As with LLMs, there are a variety of image-generating AI systems to choose from. The highest profile are DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. These are available not just through their own websites and apps but are often embedded in other services too.
Part 5: Creating a Social Media Plan with AI
Throughout this series of articles, I have looked at the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI) while offering some overall guidance for how to use it. Now it’s time to put the technology to work on a hypothetical project and see how it performs.
I am going to make a social media campaign for a bookshop called Bookworm’s Bounty. (Yes, I also used AI to invent the name.) The shop has a physical premises but wants to build an online mail-order business to reach beyond its local area. The owner knows social media plays an important role in making this work but has no tech expertise. Let’s see if generative AI can help.
Part 6: AI Risks, Limitations, Ethical Considerations, and Regulations
Recently, and for reasons known only to itself, the YouTube algorithm surfaced a video for me of a 2010 conference on what was known as “Antennagate”. I was Technology Editor at a newspaper at the time, so I remember it well: it was easy to accidentally cover the antenna on the newly released iPhone 4, which could cause dropped calls. Steve Jobs offered free cases as a fix, but not before pointing out that lots of other leading smartphones had the same problem.
At the time, ‘smartphones’ were only three and half years old as a category. Antennas were still being worked out. That seems relevant here because generative AI has been publicly available for only about 18 months. There are still many things to work out, from performance and reliability to regulation and safety.
Think of this article as the equivalent of the free phone case: it doesn’t fix the problems, but it will cover them well enough that they shouldn’t bother you.
Want to turn AI into your business's most powerful asset?
Lenovo Pro offers tailored IT solutions, including advanced product selection, dedicated support, and exclusive discounts, to help you understand and overcome anything the business world can throw at you.
Click here to learn more and join Lenovo Pro for free today.