AI uptake is accelerating and keeping up is crucial, says Vilde Myklebust, business consultant at Sopra Steria Norway. Here are three tips on how to stay in the race.
How up-to-date are you with the latest in artificial intelligence, and how can you use it in your daily work?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not just a part of the future; it already shapes our everyday life here and now. Generative AI is a groundbreaking technology that enables machines to create content across various domains, with new breakthroughs happening every week.
The technology can create everything from realistic images to complex texts and decision support and is developing at an incredible pace. To understand its potential, we must recognise that AI today is a dynamic and growing force that continually offers new opportunities and solutions. But how can we harness this potential? Here are three tips:
1. Provide AI Training to Employees
For companies to fully benefit from AI, it is crucial that employees receive the necessary training. Mastering AI tools requires both time and resources, but the investment undoubtedly pays off. By enhancing the AI competence of employees, companies will be able to exploit the full potential of the technology. This can lead to innovation, better decision-making, and efficiency at all levels of the organisation.
2. Stay Updated and Engage with New Technology – RAG
Staying ahead with AI can result in a significant competitive advantage. By integrating AI into daily operations, companies can potentially become more efficient and productive. We already see several examples of how generative AI adds great value and there are also many future possibilities too. Internally in our company, we have developed several chatbots used as tools to streamline daily work.
To develop our internal chatbots, we have used what is called Retrieval Augmented Generation technology (RAG). This technology combines two different methods of generating text and is an effective tool for refining the message in our internal documents and improving the messages in the chatbot. RAG can also be used to minimise so-called hallucinations, i.e., the chatbot's ability to produce false information.
3. Engage with Generative AI – Prompt Engineering
To increase the chances of getting the desired results, you should work with so-called prompt engineering, a technique for how you "talk" to generative AI. The art is to formulate tasks and questions in such a way that generative AI tools produce good results.
This is a critical skill for everyone using generative AI, to make the tool as effective as possible with the quality that you need. At Sopra Steria we have developed our own "Prompt Engineering Cheat Sheet" which serves as an efficiency tool that all employees can use to maximise results. The cheat sheet enables our consultants to use language models even more effectively.
These were just three tips to get started, and there will be more. It is no longer optional to understand and integrate artificial intelligence into work processes and our daily lives. It is a necessity to keep pace with technological development. By embracing this future, we can both enhance today's business and simultaneously open doors to new opportunities that we could only dream of a decade ago.