Hello,
First note, so I'll keep it short and useful.
If you're here from LinkedIn, you know the headline: we've hired our first person whose only job is AI. His brief is to take the AI work we've been doing by hand, get it running on its own, and then build on it and make it better. More on that as it happens.
On his first afternoon we gave him access to our sales data. Read-only, meaning he can look at anything but change nothing. That's takeaway one: almost every business system sits on a database, your IT person can set up a read-only login in about ten minutes, and it means anyone can safely explore your data with zero risk to anything live.
One of the things we do with that data is find the customers who have quietly gone quiet. Every business has them, and almost nobody has the list. We've been building our version for the best part of 18 months, so it goes a fair bit deeper than this now, but with the right data you can get genuine value in ten minutes. Export customer sales by month for the last two years (any accounts package or till system can do this), paste it in with this:
Copy and paste this one:
"Here are my customer sales by month. Find the customers who have gone quiet and rank them by how much annual revenue looks to have disappeared. Give me the top ten worth a phone call."
Rough compared to the proper version, but it will surface names worth a call today, and that's ten minutes well spent in any business.
For us this started as a manual job. Export, work through it, send out the lists. Slow, so it happened less often than it should. The new guy looked at it and asked why we don't automate that part. He'd been in the building six hours. I built that process, and once you've built something you stop questioning it.
So point that same question at your own place. Pick one job that gets done by hand every week and try this:
Copy and paste this one:
"This is a job we do manually every week. Ask me questions about it, then tell me honestly how much of it could be automated and what the first step would be."
You'll find out whether that job is real work or just a habit.
If you try either of these and want a second opinion on what comes back, just reply.
At the end of the week I'm going to sit and write up how a complete beginner can get immediate value from AI, as it's the most common request I get by far.
Andrew