Personal AI x Business AI

By Kerry Robinson

"This is the most fun I've had at work in 20 years"

Said one of the attendees of our internal Personal AI transformation course. Another shared:

"I just finalized in 3 hours with ChatGPT today what has been taking months to accomplish"

It's fantastic to see momentum building and minds opening. Some of the course participants are already starting to build custom GPTs.

At the same time as helping employees become 10x knowledge workers we're building custom tools on the Microsoft Azure AI stack to help the Sales and PMO teams, with deep integration into our business systems.

So we’ve got two things going on in parallel:

Personal AI - empowering employees to leverage end-user focused AI tools like - like ChatGPT - to become 10x knowledge workers

Business AI - creating AI powered processes and tools to 10x the value we deliver to clients

We're beginning to see a productive collaboration between these Personal AI and Business AI programs:

• Users of Personal AI tools discover and develop new ways to use AI in their daily work. Some become 'makers' - creating simple customGPTs to help with specific tasks. They might even share them with colleagues.
• Our AI first business transformation team watches closely, and spots opportunities to expand and scale up those ideas with stronger AI and deeper integration into our business systems. We pull on the threads in deeper Discovery sessions to unearth underlying issues. We find bigger opportunities, that cut across roles, and teams.
• Then the AI first business transformation program builds new custom AI solutions and makes them available to everyone who needs them. We can do more, because we can amortize the cost of building and integrating across a wider team, and we can monitor and improve the systems so the experience and impact gets better for everybody.

We can also expose the AI solutions we build as APIs and ‘Tools’ that makers can leverage from inside of a customGPT. Just like the built-in web search, image generation, code interpreter and data analysis tools inside of ChatGPT.

A question we’re starting to ponder - and that I’ll return to in a later email - is what’s the right interface? How do users decide when to go to ChatGPT vs another AI solution we’ve built, or bought?

This gets to the heart of a big unsolved problem: now we have Gen AI, what new interface paradigms might be possible? And which will most powerfully leverage the capabilities of individuals, AI and organizations?

But we don’t need to solve for that right now. Because the impact of Personal AI and Business AI is already starting to ripple through the business.

AI first businesses are faster. (“I finished in 3 hours… what has been taking months to accomplish”)

And more fun. ("This is the most fun I've had at work in 20 years")

But they don’t happen by accident.

You can’t just give everyone ChatGPT and hope for the best.

As my chairman at VoxGen… my previous company once said: “Great businesses are willed into existence” - referring to the role of the CEO in dragging, pushing, inspiring, and allowing a business to succeed.

I think this is more true now than ever.

AI first businesses are willed into existence.

Do you have that will?

Kerry Robinson is an Oxford physicist with a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. Kerry is a technologist, scientist, and lover of data with over 20 years of experience in conversational AI. He combines business, customer experience, and technical expertise to deliver IVR, voice, and chatbot strategy and keep Waterfield Tech buzzing.

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