Is AI Overhyped?

⏳ Read time: under 5 minutes

Welcome back, Aioli enthusiast

I took a brief hiatus to do some deep work and also recover from COVID (my first time, and it is not fun), but I’m back to bring you another edition of a newsletter about AI that is worth reading!

Today’s Spread

• 🍓 Sharing my AI Secrets on The Good Food CFO Podcast

• 🎨 Instantly make visual flowcharts in Claude

• 🫀 A tool that makes AI generated text sound more human

• 📊 Is AI overhyped, or just beginning to show its potential? A deep dive with VC firm Andreesen Horowitz

• 📰 This Week’s AI News to Know, in Bite-Sized Form

  
  
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AI Research

My Podcast Debut!

My podcast episode on the Good Food CFO Podcast with Sarah Delevan is out! 🍓 We had a fantastic conversation about how generative AI can benefit Good Food Founders.

Tune in to hear:
✨ How to get started with AI and the tools available to streamline your business
✨ Ways AI can elevate your communications strategy
✨ The time savings from creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) with AI
✨ How generative AI can create synthetic focus groups to test new ideas and gauge customer reactions
✨ Tips for keeping your data secure
✨ And so much more!

AI Tools

 🎨 How to visualize anything with diagrams using Claude 3.5 Sonnet

1. Go to Claude’s website and log in.

2. Select Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the model.

3. Use the following prompt, or tailor it to your situation:

Create a simple visualization showing me a supply chain management process

Pro tip: It may provide you with the visualization in “Mermaid” code. To download that as a PNG, copy the code to your clipboard, go to mermaid.live, and paste the code in. From there, you can export the file as a high-res PNG.

AI Tips

🫀 Humanize Your AI Output

At this point, seasoned chatbot users can detect AI-generated formatting and writing patterns (there’s a list of words that ChatGPT is famous for overusing, like “delve”). Aside from clever prompt engineering or manual adjustments, there’s a new tool that offers to eliminate robotic undertones in your ChatGPT (or any other language model) output. Simply paste in the copy, press “Humanize”, and the tool will convert your text into more natural-sounding, human-like content.

Try it out for yourself! It’s entirely free and you don’t need to make an account:

Parting note: I encourage you to further refine your output to make it your own. I believe that AI is best used to enhance, not replace 🙂 

AI Landscape

📊 Is AI Overhyped? VC Firm Andreesen Horowitz’s Take on the Future of AI

AI has emerged as the most influential topic in technology and markets today. The pressing question on everyone’s mind is whether AI is overhyped or if it is just beginning to show its potential.

I found this piece (“The AI Future is Already Here, It’s Just Not Productized Yet”) by VC Firm Andreesen Horowitz to be particularly compelling, seeing as they are largely responsible for driving this revolution.

From the article: “Today, every enterprise is grappling with how to “add” AI to their business, while entrepreneurs who are building with AI are unlocking efficiencies never before possible. Whether you’re an executive aiming to ramp up productivity in your company through AI or an entrepreneur looking to start a new business, there is opportunity wherever you see a preponderance of these tasks.”

Here’s how they break down opportunities for leveraging AI right now:

1. AI agents–Autonomous AI that can help you by automating repetitive tasks for a specific role

2. Vertical-specific custom software–Software that is custom-built for industries, companies, or even specific workers

3. Horizontal support software–that helps knowledge workers do their job better.

They outline the biggest opportunities that I have identified as an entrepreneur and AI integrator for small businesses:

• New AI companies will emerge to automate tricky pain points or detail-oriented processes where previous software attempts were too error-ridden or costly. In areas where you may have had to hire “business operations,” there may now be an opportunity for an AI solution.

• Systems that were once considered too dangerous to “rip and replace” are now vulnerable. Prior substitutes were 2x better than incumbents; the new AI-first competition is 10x better, thus increasing buyer receptivity. Incumbents that require trained consultants for lengthy implementations, where customers must file tickets for feature fixes and wait weeks for updates, are particularly vulnerable (including ERPs, CRMs, banking and insurance core systems, and more). 

To put it into context, here’s an example of an AI-enhanced automation I have built for a catering company. Such a solution would not be feasible (for technical reasons and for cost implications) without generative AI.

Problem: A corporate catering company receives orders from 12 different 3rd-party platforms. This takes hours every day for the business owner (a small mom-and-pop operation) to sort through to validate that the pricing is accurate, consolidate the orders for the kitchen, and devise a delivery route for their drivers.

Solution: I built them a custom automation to eliminate the manual work. Now, an order notification email triggers the automation to run, reading the order and validating it against the stored pricing sheet, adding it to the Daily Order Sheet for the kitchen, and sending an optimized delivery route to the owners. This saves them 4 hours per day, freeing up the time to allow them to concentrate on growing their business instead of maintaining it. No more late nights juggling kids and business tasks that need to get done in a timely manner.

So, do I think AI is overhyped? I think its misunderstood and underutilized by those who can benefit from it most. If I can help small business owners gain back valuable time in their day to spend more time with their kids, I think that AI is delivering on the promise it offers. With that said, it must be responsibly deployed to consider the limitations and risks associated with its vulnerabilities.

What are the biggest pain points of your job? Think about a task that is tedious and takes your time away from focusing on the bigger picture. Chances are, that task can be automated.

I am offering free 30 minute audits to discuss potential AI automations for your business, or how you can adopt AI tools into your workflows. Book time here. I also offer AI education trainings and workshops to help individuals and companies navigate the new AI landscape.

AI News

🍴 Quick Bites

🍲 The recipe app Pestle now uses AI to offer a feature that automatically transforms food-related Instagram Reels into recipes, allowing users to save them to their personalized collections.

🩺 OpenAI and Thrive Global are teaming up to create an AI health coach that will focus on: sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection.

🇯🇵 Japan’s Defense Ministry releases inagaural policy on using AI in military applications

Thanks for reading. Your curiosity fuels this journey.

Until next time! Stay healthy friends.

Meg 👩🏻‍💻

p.s. if you want to sign up for this newsletter or share it with a friend or colleague, you can do so here. For questions and feedback, email me at [email protected]