Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably been hearing about the role of AI in…everything. AI for learning, AI for exercise, AI for cooking, and AI for parking tickets! (Yes, there’s an AI bot that will contest a parking ticket for you.)
The extreme use cases for any technology, especially AI, are typically what grab headlines. The wild cases are fun things to talk about at conferences and are usually worth a slide or two in a presentation where you are looking to sound impressive. However, using an affordable, democratized, and game changing technology like AI in a practical way might be a better place to start.
It’s my strong feeling that one of the most practical use cases for AI, such as ChatGPT, is to ask simple questions of complex data sets. We have seen this example play out in our business time after time. Example: Scan my maintenance ticket database and find me the most common issues and segment by month, season or installer. Before ChatGPT, that’s a half day of work IF you’re a wizard in excel. Most employees in a livestock production organization don’t have time in their day to create an excel model and it’s probably not on the list of evening activities either!
So how does the common employee get quick and practical answers relevant to their job and critical to the success of the organization?
Step 1: Start interacting with AI tools like ChatGPT to build your confidence in the tool. Replace a google search with a ChatGPT search. Ask it to build a 5 day workout schedule. Ask it to summarize your personal credit card statement and look for ways to save money. Ask it to write a one sentence summary of Moore’s Law (see below).
Step 2: Digitize any data that you can. The explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has made it possible to digitize more and more data points across livestock production very affordably. (Moore’s Law). AI tools like ChatGPT can analyze and find insights in complex DIGITAL data sets. Data sitting in your barn on a clipboard or stuck in an analog device will not be useful. Start by digitizing one data source: daily water consumption.
Step 3: Input small datasets into your AI tool and ask for insights. Speak to the tool like a human. Tell it what your role is and ask for help in finding useful and actionable items in a dataset. If you did step one you might ask, “which sites dropped water consumption by 15% or more in the last three days?”
**For clarity, BJ wrote every word of this himself and not with ChatGPT 🙂
