With all the hype about AI, where do you start?

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“Artificial Intelligence” research dates back to WWII, but AI truly became mainstream with ChatGPT’s debut in 2022. Now companies are throwing millions — even $60 or $500 billion — at AI. 

To kick things off and inspire you with “the art of the possible,” I’ll demo some AI tools that anyone can use, but were just a dream even a couple of years ago.

Some occupations — even some well-paid Finance jobs — are definitely at risk of being automated away. 

So is AI coming for your job? We review economists’ and other smart people’s predictions, and look at what employers are saying about the importance of AI skills for their current and future employees.

As with all these topics, this one is optional. But rather than treating AI as a magical black box, it helps to have some idea how it comes up with its answers (or images, or music, or...), so you can ask it better questions. Don’t worry; we’ll keep it high-level.

Get AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and Gemini working for you to help improve productivity and enhance creativity. Anyone can ask these tools a basic question, but how you phrase your request makes a big difference to the quality and reliability of their response. And some tools are better for certain tasks.

Participants get more out of the session if they bring their laptops/tablets and try these techniques themselves. A 90-minute workshop (rather than 60) is suggested to allow time for this, including “show and tell” of what they produce.

If you already know that “Help me buy a shirt” is a vague and rather ineffective question to ask AI, then let’s up your game even further. Get a panel of AI “experts” to advise on your marketing plan, or critique your CV or presentation. Or have AI help you plan a trip for people with different needs and interests, including real hotel and activity recommendations. Perhaps even automate some of your routine tasks with an AI assistant.

As above, a 90-minute workshop is recommended to allow time for participants to practise applying what they’ve learned.

AI can do amazing things, but it’s not all good news.

We’ll delve into how AI can perpetuate biases, confidently state false information as fact, “hallucinate” bizarre responses, leak your private data to the internet, infringe copyright, and more. And we’ll discuss practical ways to mitigate these problems — so that participants leave knowing how to protect sensitive data and spot AI errors before they cause real damage.

Governments around the world are scrambling to catch up to advancements in AI. While I’m not a lawyer, I can provide an overview of existing and upcoming AI regulation, and how it might affect you.

Also if you already have AI policies, compliance or audit programmes in place, let’s remind participants what they cover and where to find them.

Want some tips on how to get useful output out of image generators like DALL-E and Imagen, or video generation tools like Sora? How about using AI to create data visualisations of your existing PDFs, spreadsheets and presentations? I’m happy to help wherever I can — let’s talk!