AI for the rest of us!
When people think about using AI it gets daunting, what can I use it for, how can it help me? What if you thought about AI as being a mentor instead of a technology? I think most people start the journey on the path to AI with a use case, the how do I do something, write a script, make an angry email sound a little softer but still get your point across. Sure, it’s good for that, maybe not perfect but better than doing it all by yourself. I have found that AI is more powerful when you use it as digital mentor.
Guard Rails: AI will train itself based on the data provided. What this means is that it will take your data and use it to learn. While this is powerful and overall helps the quality of the data it is basing its answers on, it will use that data for others. A good practice is to clean your data of any identifiable marker. Remove names, addresses, social security numbers etc… Pretty much anything that you wouldn’t sit on a park bench. You can also use AI’s, such as Microsoft Copilot, which can be trained on company data but in a bubble protecting you from data leakage that could be detrimental to your business.
Your AI journey: When you start using AI, most people start with a simple ask, a sentence, maybe a paragraph. When you give AI the full context and are specific on your ask, your results are much better.
Sentence: Write a script that creates a conference room in M365.
Paragraph: Write a script that creates a conference room in M365. I want to set the location, how many users the room can handle, and a room manager that can move or delete meetings. This should be a cloud only conference room with no AD sync. I would like to use a .csv file to create the room based on fields in the .csv.
Contextual: I am an IT professional and I need a script that allows users to create a conference room with the following format based on input from a .csv. It should base it off a field called confrmname and take a generic name such as NewConfRoom and have the displayname and name fields changed to follow this format: NewConfRoom-Video. The other fields I would like are for the room manager labeled as rmmgr that can add or remove meetings, a field called capacity that is numeric, and a field called location for the physical location of the conference room. I want this to be easy to update so let me know if there is a way that I can either use a .csv or if one is not provided that it ask me the questions to create the room using a similar format.
In any case it will create a script to do what you asked for. You may have some cleanup to do but the more details you can provide, the less you have to fix. You can also use AI as a life coach, a business mentor, a financial advisor etc… the key is that you are in control and if it sounds off, well it probably is.
AI is in my opinion a technology that is as awesome as the internet. When I started in IT, we did everything using WIKIs if they existed, otherwise we banged our head on the keyboard until we figured it out. Then came the internet, then YouTube. AI is the culmination of this shared knowledge. Learn to speak AI, learn to leverage AI responsibly, and get a competitive edge on the folks that are fighting against the technology and its potential.