{"id":788,"date":"2024-10-19T21:38:32","date_gmt":"2024-10-19T21:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/ai\/?p=788"},"modified":"2024-10-20T01:20:29","modified_gmt":"2024-10-20T01:20:29","slug":"ready-or-not-the-future-is-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/ai\/2024\/10\/19\/ready-or-not-the-future-is-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Ready or Not, the Future is Here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Forty to 50 years ago, a long-established camera company enjoyed long-established dominance of the market for instant photos. Until it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The advent of digital photography, its omnipresence on mobile phones, and its rapidly increasing quality didn\u2019t happen overnight. But it did happen without an effective, competitive response from the established camera company: Polaroid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Which is today \u201cbarely a shell of what it once was,\u201d Dr. Neil Morelli said in his presentation at the October offering in the monthly program series from \u201cChattanooga\u2019s Artificial Intelligence Network,\u201d or CHAIN, organized by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Center for Professional Education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each month, the series takes a look at a facet of work or business affected by the rise of AI technology. Morelli\u2019s presentation came under the topic of \u201cWorkplace Tools: AI for Everyday Tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morelli, chief organizational psychologist for a company called Codility, was joined by Jonathan Flower, an AI engineer and software architect. Both are based in Atlanta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morelli said he cited the fate of Polaroid as a call to action, to realize that now is a time of change being prompted by AI that can\u2019t be ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy point is, just remember that it’ll seem to be happening very gradually and if you\u2019re not paying attention, you\u2019ll be caught by surprise by a sudden realization that we’re in a different era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to make the case that you need to embrace this and start to integrate it into your work today,\u201d Morelli said, \u201cand one of the ways of doing this is through a term coined recently: \u2018citizen developers.\u2019 With AI tools, everyone can be a developer to some degree. Not to say that software engineers are going away, but now, with AI, you can build simple automations or customizations of the tools that you already use.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To make the point, Morelli noted that a founder of OpenAI has said \u201cEnglish is the newest computer programming language,\u201d since AI now makes it possible to give commands to computers in natural, spoken language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the practical workplace uses of generative AI that Morelli shared with the working professionals gathered was customer research. He urged inputting a customer persona into \u201cyour AI tool of your choice,\u201d then asking the AI platform \u201ctons of questions\u201d to be answered based on the persona created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor example, I could create the persona of an HR leader at a mid-market company of a certain size, going through certain types of challenges,\u201d Morelli said. \u201cThen, I could talk about how Jonathan and I are starting an AI for HR consulting and training company called Workplace Labs, and we\u2019re focusing on HR leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can ask it tons of questions to give me initial feedback, an initial reaction to our landing page copy, or maybe there are some questions or challenges we haven’t really uncovered. It could help us empathize with our target customer persona better or maybe better identify our audience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Other useful personas?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your boss\u2014for reviewing and improving work before handing it over to your real-life boss. A prospective client\u2014for assessing the persuasive power of a report or email intended to pursue business. An editor\u2014to review and improve written content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the pair\u2019s work to establish an AI for HR consultancy, Morelli said they are taking an approach inspired by \u201cproduct development.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn a product team, the focus is on the jobs to be done by the target user,\u201d he said. \u201cAI can help identify tasks within a broad range of HR functions, then we can experiment with more advanced prompts. This is a good practical step to take that can get AI involved that doesn’t take a lot of background knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThrough our consulting venture, we want to train people on a framework to walk them through it to identify use cases, primarily focusing on HR.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most likely use cases\u2014AI as a tool to quickly and efficiently create job descriptions\u2014was demonstrated by Flower. He created a hypothetical \u201csoftware engineer at Microsoft\u201d description using ChatGPT 4.0 and a \u201cprompt template\u201d he developed for the task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flower interacted with the platform to have it revise language to enhance the importance of innovation to the job mission. And to have it add an opening paragraph stating \u201cMicrosoft is a global leader committed to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more\u201d\u2014that ChatGPT retrieved from a Microsoft website at his direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, as he put it, \u201cRather than simply spitting out an entire job description, it can guide you, summarize the research, and ask you questions to help you in refining the job description.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pair\u2019s presentation also highlighted several powerful AI tools:<\/p>\n\n\n\n