There’s a LOT of hype around AI, and I’m keen to dig past that and understand how real people are using it to support / augment business analysis …
I’ve had some successes (and also a bunch of failures) and I wonder if there’s appetite for a sort of show and tell – share learnings and use cases? What worked? What didn’t?
You know, kind of a counter to all the hype!
CC: @RhiB
I love AI! I dislike the hype.
The reality is LLMs have some serious limitations.
Prompt engineering is so important. But, big tech kind of just released these things into the into the wild, without much guidance. They are still largely black boxes.
I treat my model like a junior colleague who I can bounce ideas off, get to write drafts of documents, do basic analysis, and summarise things. I also treat it as a bit of a PA, in that I frequently use it to draft emails, meeting invites, agendas and that sort of thing. It’s like predictive text on steroids, which is so helpful for admin!
I had a really interesting experience this week where I was developing an integration to create a Document Set in SharePoint using data pulled from Airtable (yeah I have somehow become a BA who develops low-code apps 
). This is something that was technically beyond my knowledge - so of course I turned to my AI friend!
Essentially, I spent Monday using ChatGPT going around in circles - going from messages of “it can’t be done via Make’s graph API calls”, to being given steps that just didn’t work at all …. Similarly, my manual googling landed me in the same situation.
And then last night I sat down and tried again - and the ChatGPT model that was available two days later was a whole different experience! This time, instead of spitting out an answer straight away, it worked through its thinking for close to a minute - before spitting out an answer that worked! Like, slam dunk nailed it!!
(And when I say ‘straight out’, what I really mean is lots of back and forward, pasting in error messages and working as a team to iron out the kinks 
).
So - I’m a big fan BUT selecting the right model for the right situation is so important!!!