Leveraging AI

49 | 7 Things You Must Do in 2024 to Harness AI in Your Business with Isar Meitis

• Isar Meitis • Season 1 • Episode 49

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Can AI Really 10x Your Business in 2024? 🤔

In this year end episode of Leveraging AI, we say YES!! 

Isar Meitis shares his checklist of 7 must-do items to successfully implement AI in your business in 2024. 

Learn practical tips and frameworks to leverage AI and advance your business today. 

Topics I discussed:

  • Continuous learning - Follow experts, take courses, stay updated
  • Start an AI committee - Drive adoption, set guidelines
  • Policies and ethics - Ensure safe and effective AI use
  • Assessments - Strategic, HR, quick wins
  • AI implementation plan - Goals, KPIs, milestones
  • Encourage experimentation - Share wins, lead by example
  • Build a prompt library - Increase efficiency

    + BONUS! 

Accelerate your AI journey - Enroll in Multiplai's GENERATIVE AI
BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION Course today!  Use code "kickoff24" to get a 24% discount off the course fee (next cohort starts on January 15th)

Spots are limited, so sign up now at multiplai.ai/ai-course before this exclusive offer expires!

About Leveraging AI

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Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve your efficiency, grow your business and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and this is going to be the last episode of 2023. And everybody's already looking and planning into 2024. And in this episode, we're going to cover the seven things you must do in 2024 to harness AI in your business, plus one bonus item that's going to make it eight. All these recommendations are based on me working as a consultant with multiple businesses on exactly these topics on how to implement AI, as well as speaking in various conferences and meeting with a lot of business leaders and hearing what they're struggling with. So I came up with a checklist that you can use in order to implement it in your business as well. So let's get started. The very first thing that you must do in order to implement AI successfully in your business is continuous education. And what do I mean by continuous education? The AI field is moving extremely fast. There are new things happening literally every day every single day. Every week, there are big announcements from multiple companies that provide tools and capabilities and changes and updates. But a business cannot operate with daily or even weekly changes because you cannot just run a business this way. A business can run and make changes on quarterly basis, if it's lucky and efficient and can run faster. And it's probably smaller. So how do you keep your business up to date with what's happening in order to actually enjoy the benefits of what's coming out in the AI world without driving the people completely crazy and driving the business into the ground because there's zero consistency in processes and so on. And the way to do that is to be connected with what's currently happening, understanding the benefits, understanding what's possible, and then making changes in the cycles that are relevant to your business and maybe a little faster, but based on the information that you're continuously learning and you're not missing anything important. How do you actually do that? The first thing is you follow the right people, right? So you're listening to this podcast is a great step forward. So Leveraging AI is just one AI podcast, there's multiple others and you can find others that are relevant to the topics and the style that you like. You need and should follow relevant people who share AI relevant tips, whether it's strategy or tactics or tools on your favorite social platform. So whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, it doesn't matter where or x, find people who are practitioners and experts on this topic, follow them and stay up to date, sign up to various newsletters, multiple companies and individuals have newsletters who share news and updates and things that they're doing and achieving. I highly recommend blending news about the industry so you understand what's going on as well as updates on what people are actually doing. Specific use cases and tools because these are a lot more practical for the business and the mix of the two will allow you to really understand what is happening. The next level of learning can happen by taking courses. So multiple organizations are offering courses for AI. Different courses are geared for different situations, different organizations and different people. We provide a course under the Multiplai brand. That is a four session course, two hours each. It's an in depth course that is cohort based. So we get together a group of business leaders or wannabe business leaders into the same cohort. I'm leading the conversation, the training, but a lot of the work is hands on work together with the other people because we feel that is the best way to learn. I will share a link to the course in the show notes so you can find it very, very easily. But if you want to type it, it's Multiplai, which is the name of my company, which is spelled M U L T I P L A I dot AI forward slash AI dash course. That's really long. That's why I'm going to put the link in the show notes. But in the spirit of getting everybody prepared into 2024, I'm going to give for the first time ever at 24% discount. If you use the promo code, kickoff24 all lowercase when you sign up for the course, you will get a 24 percent discount, which is the biggest discount we ever gave but I really think it's important to start 2024 with the right foot forward. So that is for education. And as I mentioned, you got to continuously do this. One of the ways to continuously do this leads us into the second and really important item of this list, which is start an AI committee in your business. What is the AI committee and what does it do? The AI committee role is to be always up to date to drive the usage of AI in a safe and effective way within the business. So who needs to be in that committee? You want in that committee people from the different departments and different aspects of your business. Sales, marketing, HR, business development. If you are writing software, then people from that side as well. So basically every department in the company needs to be represented, or at least most of them. The type of people you want in there are preferably geeks that will actually enjoy using AI and exploring it and testing it, because then you'll get a lot more out of that process. You also want at least one person, but maybe more, and preferably the CEO out of the leadership team of the organization. Why? Two different reasons. One, it shows that you're leading by example, meaning people in leadership actually care and they're a part of the process, and two, it gets the buy in immediately, so everything the committee decides can immediately put into action versus now having to go through several different approval processes, which will slow down and reduce the effectiveness of the committee. Now, if you're not in a leadership position in your organization, you can actually be the one that's initiating this. You can come up to your higher ups, show use cases and relevant examples that are relevant to your industry, to your company, to your higher ups and say, I want to be the one championing this within our business. There's a decent likelihood you will get the keys to drive this train and you can then start adding more and more people from the different departments and so on. The next item on the list is actually the first deliverable of the committee, and that deliverable is AI policies and ethical guidelines. Multiple surveys in the past few months have found that people in organizations use ChatGPT, whether there are guidelines or there aren't. And even in cases where it's not allowed to use ChatGPT or other AI tools, people are using it on their phones. They're using it on their tablets and so on. So your ability to prevent people from using AI is very limited and it's actually wrong because it can drive a lot of business efficiencies. What you want is you want people to use AI in a safe and ethical way. What does that mean? It means you need to define the guidelines of do's and don'ts. You cannot use customer information. You cannot use proprietary information. If you want to use this kind of information, it can only be through this interface that we control and so on. So you need to define The do's and don'ts. And you also need to consider the ethical aspects. What do I mean by ethical aspects? It is very easy today to do things in deep into the gray area of what is not acceptable in any business and may or may not be acceptable based on the core values that your business has in the way you want your business to look like. As an example, salespeople in most cases get compensated through Sales and commissions and convincing people in specific things is part of what they do for a living. But there's a very clear red line of what you should and should not do in order to convince people. And it's very easy to cross that line with AI today. And that's just one simple example. So define clear guidelines, have the committee. And that's one of the reasons you have people from multiple departments. So these guidelines are comprehensive. And are inclusive of everybody in the business, including your ecosystem, your clients, your suppliers, and so on. All of that needs to be defined in those guidelines of what you should and shouldn't do. The next few items include different assessments that you need to do in order to prepare your business to use AI effectively and safely. The first one is a strategic assessment. So what do I mean by a strategic assessment? The future of your business may not be the same as it is today because of AI. That means that your clients two years from now will most likely have different needs than they have today because AI will be available. That generates risks as well as opportunities to most businesses today. The risks are that some of your product or services may not be needed, or may not be needed in the way they are needed today, which means your actual business model is at risk. And speaking of business model, that's another thing that might be at risk. People who charge based on billable hours may have a serious issue once everybody understands that you can do in minutes what used to take a week. So if you have a law firm and most of your revenue comes from billable hours, and people will understand that prepping different materials that used to take three weeks to two paralegals now take two hours to one paralegal, well guess what? You lost that revenue of those two paralegals times three weeks. So doing that strategic analysis and understanding what are the risks, but also what are the opportunities that are available to your business because of AI. So what do I mean by opportunities? There might be services or products that you were not able to provide before because it was too complicated. The overhead didn't make any sense. The ROI was too long or not high enough. Whatever the case may be, that may not be the case anymore because AI tools and AI capabilities may allow you to provide these services as add ons or as a replacement to the stuff that you're doing today. So in summary, the first assessment is a strategic assessment to evaluate. Whether the products and services that you're providing today is what your clients would want to buy from you a year and a half, two years, three years from now, and make the adjustments that are required in order to drive growth to your business versus the other way around. The next assessment is an HR assessment. Now that you know where the company wants to go, and now that the committee has a better understanding of what are the skills that are required within the business in order to achieve those goals, you need to look very carefully at the human resources that you have in the business right now. Do the people in the company have the skills that are required in order to achieve those goals with AI? Some of it will require re skilling of large groups within the company. Some of it will require hiring new people in order to get the skills and the talent that is required to make that next step. And, like in any one of those situations, some of the people that will not be able to adapt to that will need to leave because otherwise they will hold you back from doing things Better and faster than you're doing right now. So that's an HR gap assessment through the lens of the required AI skills in addition to the other things that you're looking at in the HR world. The third assessment is looking for low hanging fruits. What I mean by low hanging fruits is use cases where AI can add significant efficiencies existing processes that happen within your company. This comes from looking at literally every department and within every department, looking at the major processes that are happening and then diving a layer deeper and sometimes two layers deeper to look at the different steps. That happened in the different processes and checking whether a I can either completely eliminate or make specific steps significantly more efficient. This is a very tactical bottom up approach that compliments the top down approach of the strategy and my recommendations with the clients that are working with is to do both at the same time. The low hanging fruit approach gets you quick wins and a buy in from everybody in the organization, including owners and board and so on, because you're showing actual immediate results. It frees cash, it generates more revenue, and then it's a lot easier to do the bigger things that are connected to the strategy of the business. So how do we identify these AI low hanging fruits? You are looking for things that are repetitive, that requires data analysis, that requires data prediction, that require some human input, but not a huge amount of human input. So if you want to rewrite your business strategy, don't completely hand over to AI. But if you're looking to write posts, write a draft of a proposal, evaluate customer reviews and so on. AI is amazing at doing those kinds of things. So if you can find these things that have two, three, or four of the things we just mentioned, that are either repetitive, required data analysis, required data prediction, or requiring the average amount of human input, any combination of two of these or more will represent an opportunity for AI higher efficiencies. The next item on the list is develop an AI plan. So now that you know where you're going, you know the strategy and where you want to be, you know some low hanging fruits, you have a committee in place and you know the HR skills, you need to develop a plan on how you're actually going to start implementing these things within the business. The plan needs to, first of all, define the long term goals of the plan, but then it also needs to add different KPIs, including leading KPIs, because if you're going to wait to see, we're going to gain 30 percent efficiency in the marketing department, it. May very well get there, but it will take you nine months to get there. And if you're not evaluating anything in between, well, once you get there, it's going to be too late. So adding leading indicators such as have we established a committee? How frequently is the committee meeting? What kind of recommendations has the committee made? The committee needs to make three recommendations in the first three months of its existence that drive significant efficiencies in departments one, two, three. Now you have a KPI that is short term leading indicator to what should be the long term outcome of the process. The next item on this checklist that will prepare your business for successful AI implementation is to encourage AI usage. So how do you encourage usage? Well, you make it a thing. How do you make it a thing? You have an AI item or items on every weekly all hands meeting, you have AI related topics on your team. Meetings, you share wins from different aspects of the organization or people that have implemented AI successfully. You yourself as a leader, talk about stuff that you've tried, you share it on a Slack channel, you talk about this in meetings, so other people will want to have that conversation with you and you can lead by example by really doing and sharing stuff that you're doing and talking about this across multiple meetings and channels in the organization. So people understand it's actually encouraged and I'm going to open parentheses"encouraged under the guidelines that were defined by the committee of do's and don'ts". So nobody does anything foolish that actually harms the business. By the way, one of the things that relates to the committee and testing things and encouraging the usage of AI is the company and definitely the committee needs some kind of a sandbox in order to test things without taking big risks. And there's multiple ways to achieve that to having this sandbox or fake data for experimentation and so on. But this is one of the needs of the committee so they can experiment and try new things based on things they find or based on recommendations of other people within the organization. The next item is more of a tactical item, but it's extremely important to the success and the pace of the success of using AI, and that's having a prompt library in the company. So what is a prompt library? The way we engage with those AI systems is by writing prompts. We give them instructions to do different things that we want them to do, whether it's to analyze data, To brainstorm a new idea with us, to create marketing content, to create images for the website, whatever the case may be, we prompt the systems in order to get the outcome. Well, if every person reinvents the wheel of writing prompts every time we do stuff, and as I mentioned, a lot of activities in the business are repetitive, we're wasting a lot of time in people trying stuff out all the time. The right way to do this is to actually create a shared resource and it could be shared anywhere. It could be a Slack channel, could be a Google Doc, could be a shared drive somewhere. I use a tool called Magical Chrome Extension to share my prompts across the organization, but it doesn't matter which tool you use as long as everybody knows what's the process? What's the procedure? And where are the prompts? So people who have a need can go and check, do we already have a company defined prompt for that thing? And now they have a solid point of how to use AI to do that thing that they want to use it for. So in addition to getting everybody up to speed very quickly, the other thing that it achieves, it achieves consistency. Meaning everybody will use the same prompt, they will get similar results and similar answers versus everybody drawing. Trying different things and then they will get different results, which is not a good thing for a business. You want consistency in a business. That being said, you want people to actually do experiment. So it's okay to take that base prompt and try different things and evaluate is it actually better than the prompt that we're using right now. If it is, share it with a committee, they will evaluate it, and if they agree that it's a better prompt, that will become the shared prompt in the prompt library. tHese were the seven items on the list of things you need to implement in your business in order to get AI efficiencies in 2024. But I promised you an eighth item, which is a bonus to the seven, and it's not AI related, but it is extremely important and will become even more and more important because of the AI revolution and that is to develop better, stronger and more human connections. So this sounds counterintuitive because we're talking about AI implementation replacing some of the things humans are doing. So why is AI, why is human connection so important? It is important because by using AI tools most companies will be able to do the day to day Really well. There has been ample research in the past six months showing that people that are less skilled get significantly more benefit using AI than people that are highly skilled. And the aggregation of that will do the same for businesses. So businesses who were below average will gain much more benefit if they implement AI successfully than businesses who are doing extremely well, which means all the gaps between businesses are going to shrink. So what is going to be the differentiator between all those businesses that can do everything pretty well? Human relationships. How many and how deep are their relationships with people in their ecosystem? Suppliers, client, their own employees, and so on. How do you do that? Go to conferences. Shake hands. Attend events. Create your own events. Create a live show that you do regularly And meet with your audience and so on any way that you can to build human relationships will differentiate you and will differentiate you once AI becomes very common and everybody can do everything pretty well. So that's it. Quick recap on what you need to do coming into 2024. Continuous education, AI committee, AI policies and ethical guidelines, three different assessments, strategic assessment, low hanging fruits assessment, and an HR assessment. Develop an AI plan with clear KPIs, including leading indicators, encourage AI usage, develop a prompt library and invest in human relationships. As I mentioned, if you want to take the course, our next cohort starts on January 15th, and you can use the promo code kickoff24 to get 24 percent off. It's a very significant discount. I hope to see you there. And I wish all of you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays, and have a kick ass 2024. Keep on exploring AI, keep sharing what you learn with the world, and have an amazing year.

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Isar Meitis

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