Launching AI Trix Consulting

I always aspired to be an entrepreneur. Have a successful business and make money myself, no paychecks in sight.

Thanks to AI, I am taking my chance!

AI is disrupting how people ask questions, do research, create content, and more. Things are changing really fast. It already feels like AI is everywhere in technology. How software is built has been irreversibly changed by large language models (LLMs) and that will continue. Other industries won't be far behind.

Whenever things are changing it's an opportunity to help people and companies through. My thesis is that all "white-collar work", all "knowledge work", will be changed and improved by AI. AI can add efficiency, scale up creativity, and remove drudgery.

Adding Efficiency

Imagine you have a whole ton of messy data. To clean it, you might need to pull it into a spreadsheet, reorder some columns, reformat some rows, maybe re-export it, before finally being able to use it. Now, you can attach your messy data file to an chat with an AI, and tell it "Clean this up". Going further, you can even say "What's interesting in this data?" and go with what it decides. Then you can say "Plot it" and watch the AI write code to chart the interesting stuff in your data. Now, you can inspect it visually. You can keep asking questions - in English - until you're satisfied you understand the data, all without waiting on another human to write queries, generate visualizations, or help you find interesting stuff in it.

Scaling Up Creativity

Imagine you want to email a bunch of prospects to get them excited about something you're doing - say you have a new product launch and want to reach out to your list about it. You could mass email them the same email (yuck) or with AI you could make every email a personally written note:

1. Plug the prospect's email address into an enrichment platform and discover more about them - where they work, their industry, what they're working on recently, any content they've produced online, etc.
2. Retrieve all the background info, such as what they're working on, recent public appearances, etc.
3. Paste all the info to an AI prompt, and ask for recommended online resources the person might be interested in. You might have a library of blog posts, case studies related to what they're working on, etc. that can be searched. Maybe you'd ask for 3 suggested bits of content to attach to an outreach email, that might be of interest to your prospect.
4. Have another AI draft an email in your desired voice which is addressed to your prospect and contains links to the resources the AI recommended for them
5. Not send the email but leave it in your outbox waiting to be proofread by you, a human
6. Repeat this process potentially hundreds or thousands of times, making it look to each prospect like you manually typed them a one-off message.

Once set up, this workflow can scale up your outreach, thanks to far less human input being needed - maybe a final few edits before approval to send.

Removing Drudgery

Imagine the weekly report you generate of your teams' key metrics. It contains key charts, a narrative about the week, and some highlights and lowlights. Pulling the metrics, writing the narrative, and combining into a report ready for approval takes a few hours on Friday afternoon. But now, it can be done with an AI agent. Once you tweak the agent until it produces reports you like, all that's left is to proofread and hit send.

Interestingly being able to produce such reports on a better-than-weekly cadence opens up possibilities like providing the data daily, on demand, or even in real time via a portal. All of this can be done with a bit of skill in AI.

My Niche: helping knowledge workers and businesses leverage AI

I help knowledge workers use AI in their daily work, and help businesses use AI to gain efficiency.

Non-niches: AI products, Software Products

There are lots of AI products out there. I am focused on people and process, though I use tools to achieve the outcomes. Some are invaluable, like make.com for the "glue" that stitches software together. Stitching software together tends to be drudgerous, tough to automate, and driven by humans - a perfect place for this new technology.

Stitching Things Together

No matter how much automation you have there's always work needed to stick things together. Maybe you grab data from one place to combine with another. Maybe you pull data from many places across your business to help with decision making. Maybe you produce a report for which the process takes many steps and involves many people. Maybe a decision needs human intuition and can be made even better with an AI to go back and forth with and refine the thinking - an AI counsellor, if you will. All of these can be done by someone who knows a bit about AI.

Examples of business process automation

Say you are doing due diligence on a vendor, counterparty, client, etc.

AI can perform the steps of downloading company details from a government website. It can retrieve public records, do web searches - and rate how legitimate the company is - and give you a guesstimate of how likely they will be to pay! This work might have been done before by a junior person. Now it can be automated, freeing that junior person from quite a lot of drudgery - if you know a little about how to do it.

In Summary...

AI can help people work smarter and can streamline business processes. If you know how, teams can become far more effective. It looks like a mix of one-offs, custom tools, and stitched-together chains of tools.

My Plan: Consult as an AI Expert to Help People Use AI

AI in office work and business processes is huge and rife with opportunity. The folks that can make use of the tech - and keep up with new capabilities as they emerge - will be irreplaceable. You won't be able to replace them even if AI doom happens and jobs are decimated - because they'll be the ones directing the AIs.

Technology will continue to bifurcate those with these skills from those without, and the ones without will be left behind. I want to arm as many people as possible with the skills.

To that end I have started AI Trix Consulting which helps people, teams, and businesses to use AI to enhance their work, automate, and remove drudgery.

Go have a look today! If you think I can help, use the contact form to reach out.

Thanks for reading!