Daily Inspiration: AI and innovation – “Use the tools”

“Use the tools” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Try my AI!

My mindset has always been ‘You can’t talk about tomorrow if you aren’t doing tomorrow.’

With that in mind, if you head over to my website – jimcarroll.com – you’ll find a little button at the top right, “Ask AI.“ (It will hopefully soon read “Ask My AI” – I’ve sent this in as a product suggestion.)

That will give you a drop-down box that begins to lead you into the AI-based tool which will construct insight from over the 4,000 posts on my site, using ChatGPT.

You can ask questions of all the material I have written since 2002, conversing with my AI just as you might converse with ChatGPT. It’s the same technology. For example, if you ask “How does an organization become more innovative?“, it will give you a rather well-constructed response, based upon its having ingested the over 4,000 posts into a small little large-language-model, pumped out by the technology of ChatGPT.

I’ve built this into my site using CommandBar, a company long in the business of building effective customer support Website integrations, and which has recently integrated AI capabilities into its system.

When I am speaking to corporate and association groups about AI, I turn a part of my talk into the fact that in a nutshell, the way we need to approach it is an innovation story. And to me, innovation has always been about asking ourselves three questions. How might I be able to use new tools to help me to run my business better? Grow my business? Transform my business? Or, invent a new business. With that in mind, here’s a slide from the deck I used in my talk for 60 CEOs last week in Houston.

Right now, there are a LOT of opportunities to ‘run the business better‘ with the first batch of AI-based tools – such as using a service like CommandBar.

I was able to rather easily and effortlessly, with just a bit of poking around and pressing buttons – integrate an AI into my site. CommandBar has long supported the ‘integration’ of their help and product support navigation tools into existing technology marketing and customer support systems such as WordPress, ZenDesk, FreshDesk, and others. This means that if you are using any of these platforms in your organization, it’s slam-dunk easy to build an AI into your site – just like I have.

You do this by linking CommandBar to your data and then building out the manner by which visitors will ‘talk’ to the data. In my case, I simply constructed the screen that appears to visitors clicking on the AI on my site and linked it to my ChatGPT account. Voila – I’ve got an AI. It’s pretty effective.

A company like CommandBar, long in existence, already offered up multiple sophisticated customer support and customer acquisition systems – in addition to AI-powered Help, it offers product tours, onboarding, and survey technology.

For me, I can’t just talk with my clients about the opportunity of AI – I can only do so if I have the integrity that comes from actually deploying the tools. My integration of AI into my Website is just one of the many things I am doing to go down this path.

Innovation?

Use the tools. Deploy the technology. Chase the ideas. Do the steps!

Right now, there is a lot of ‘low hanging fruit’ that you can pick that is based on AI – and you can only taste the opportunity if you actually choose to do so!