Every time I talk with another founder they will bring up AI. Every podcast, AI. Scroll LinkedIn, AI. Walk the dog, AI.
Talking with my AI assistant I was loosing focus on TransitChat, I was adding more to do’s on the daily than I was able to accomplish. I was relying on transcripts to take notes rather than listening to people. And I was configuring a setup for hours for it to so something that would allow me to perform 1% better.
TL;DR Stop getting distracted by the AI hype train. Use it to empower your team, not replace them—an. Use AI to categorize, tag, and structure your data first. Organizing everything upfront keeps costs sustainable and actually helps your team find the needle in the haystack.
Learn from my mistakes
I say all this so I can prevent you from spending hours on procurement to buy something that will leave you and your team with a bad solution.
Your most valuable asset is your staff
They have worked for your agency for at least a decade and working at your agency they have developed a knowledge that you cannot hire.
This applies to the trust that they have built with your staff and riders. Swapping out those humans they built relationships will make people recoil and you should be sure that we can afford to lose that trust.
Every agency that I have worked for has had a terrible backlog of files on hand called the share drive. Putting the question out there on LinkedIn this overwhelming came back with this is a huge problem.
Before AI we would just pay a person by the hour to go through and find it, but now you are paying by the character scanned (token). If you start adding more documents your AI will increasing have to scan more and more documents to come back with an informed answer. This is displayed above by showing the increase in documents as well as its associated AI costs with a set amount of queries on 5% of your share drive.
While this is an imperfect measurement, the math is sound and it is undeniable, without thought put into how you will store and query information you will see answers harder to come by and increased costs.
AI structures and organizes for your team
Being able to take notes, categorize and summarize are things that we have been paying attention to as the benefits of AI. Being able to leverage this at scale means that you should be using it to give your biggest asset more power and organizing it in a way that will not increase costs over time.
That means you need to have stops, routes, teams, out comes and dates for every email, chat and meeting transcript down to the page or paragraph to see something worth it to jump onto.
Being able to do this quickly and have everything findable for AI to use is the key to having a sustainable practice and successful pilot.
In short have AI organizes, categorize and break everything down ONCE so it can find the needle in the haystack.
Disagree with me? Got some questions? Email me at [email protected]