In our previous Prescriptive Profits Top Trends to Track in 2023 Pt. 3, we predict that 2023 will be the year of AI.

New technology creates new capabilities and a duty to learn how to best wield that power. We believe that businesses that learn how to utilize technology to augment their business puts them in a position to not only survive future market & societal changes, but thrive. The losers will be the stubborn dinosaurs who are resistant to change and fall into the trap of “we’ve always done it this way” only to wind up being buried next to Blockbuster’s tombstone.

While AI is already powerful, it is important to remember that the technology is still in its infancy and there are key things to acknowledge to gain a better understanding of where the technology is and where it is going.

Here are our top 5:

1. AI is a loose term: AI is currently one of the buzzwords, if not THE buzz word, that is catching mainstream attention. While AI is a transformative technology, it encompasses a wide range of technology with varying capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. From simple rule-based systems to advanced neural networks, it’s important to understand the different types of AI and their capabilities to determine which one is best suited for a particular task.

2. AI is data-driven: AI models are trained on large amounts of data. The quality and diversity of the data is critical to the performance of the AI tool. Said bluntly, the AI performance will only be as good as the data it is utilizing. It’s important to understand the characteristics and quality of your data when working with AI technology and keep in mind that the quality of data will impact results.

1. Powerful AI + Bad Data = Poor Performance

3. AI is not a magic wand: AI is a powerful tool, but it’s not a magic wand. It can automate repetitive tasks, analyze large data sets, and make predictions, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution and it may not be the best approach for all tasks. Make sure you use AI to enhance human ingenuity and creativity, not replace it. 

4. AI is not perfect: AI models are not perfect and can make mistakes. When using AI, make sure to double-check results. However, the best part about this realization is that AI will learn from its mistakes and get better with usage and time, so provide feedback when the results are good. If the results miss expectations, inform the AI so that it can learn for future improvement. Understanding the limitations of the AI models, continuously monitoring their performance, along with providing them feedback, will set you up for success when leveraging AI.

5. AI is still in its early stages: As powerful as this technology currently is, AI is a rapidly evolving field, and new developments are happening all the time. It’s important to keep up with the latest developments in AI and understand the potential impact of these developments on society. Much of AI is built on earlier versions of the technology and future AI will be built on existing AI systems. Keep in mind that you are currently in the midst of a technological shift and there is still a long way to go in terms of technology development.

This is the point in time where AI is the Internet before it became the INTERNET. Early adopters were rewarded for their innovative thinking and it was only a matter of time before everybody else saw the light and couldn’t stay away.

Through our experimentation and utilization of a multitude of AI tools, one has risen to the top – ChatGPT. Its ability to perform, its ease of use and the multitude of ways to use it, along with being made available to the general public for free, is what sets ChatGPT apart from all other AI tools currently. The technology is not exactly innovative and has existed in tech research labs for years, but the engineering of this particular AI makes it so easy to use that anyone with internet access can wield its powers, for free, thrusting it into the spotlight.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm recently after its successfully passing the US Medical License Exam, The Bar Exam, and the Wharton Business School MBA Exam – the prestigious tests that certify society’s upper echelon of white-collar professions.

The tool has become popular for being able to take a prompt and provide an answer within seconds. Prompts can be generating articles, creating poetry or songs, crafting ad campaigns, and even producing lines of code for programmers. It is able to produce some pretty incredible outputs from just a single prompt.

And unlike Alexa, or Siri, it doesn’t answer with “I’m sorry, I do not know the answer or understand the question you are trying to ask.” Instead, it scours the entire internet, every single piece of data that has been made available up until 2021, and summarizes the most relevant information for you based on the prompt you gave it. The more granular and specific the prompt, the better and more desired outcome it’ll give you.

Perhaps the most invigorating piece is the rampant growth of AI, and speed at which it’s growing. OpenAI (the company responsible for developing ChatGPT) and Microsoft have just renewed their partnership which has been in place for the past three years and Microsoft is in talks to invest as much as $10 Billion in OpenAI to continue innovating. Oh and some guy named Elon Musk is the founder of OpenAI, not sure if you’ve ever heard of him, but he likes to shake things up with technology and disrupt the norm.

The other titans of software, Google, Meta, Apple, etc. all have their own versions of AI, they just haven’t released them for use by the general public. Research labs across the globe have been developing AI for years and as investments and collaborations continue, the intelligence and capabilities of AI will explode.To make it all sync in, ChatGPT is currently on its 3rd version and is running off 175 Billion data points. The next version, ChatGPT-4, will work off of 100 Trillion – with a capital T – data points. How large of a difference is that? Check out this visualization:

Yeah, we know, pretty wild to consider. That’s why we are so bullish on the technology moving forward.

Get on board or get left behind. #RIPBlockbuster

Don’t know where to start or want us to help you better understand how you can leverage AI for your business, just give us a shout.

Let’s get to work.

Prescriptive Profits #20