johnmaconline

In addition to the website and social media content, we’ve generated a social media and web advertising strategy, and the first ads will start to run today at 6 pm. These ads draw the engagers to the top of the sales funnel that we’ve connected to your entire online presence. We’ve created a strategic communication campaign that resonates with your target audience and reuses much of the content they’ll see on your social media to ensure continuity and build the trust they require. In compliance with the marketing strategy and business objectives, we’ve set a pricing structure that requires two versions of your product with slightly different feature sets for each. This varies from your original idea of a single product but will result in a better overall product strategy and pave the way for follow-on products in the future. We’ve named your products the “BassBlaster Pro” and “BassBlaster+” and have adjusted your product definitions accordingly. 

This paragraph contains an interesting mix of AI automation in combination with decision-making. 

You’re already seeing AI advertising services and automated campaigns. Once the strategy is developed, using AI to automate the advertising and communications campaign itself is fairly straightforward.

But the humans are currently making the decisions and forming the strategies. In our scenario, the AI makes these decisions and forms the strategy. That’s coming in concert with the marketing strategy since they all work together.

The big leap here is that AI is performing the CEO and CCO’s (Chief Commercial Officer) role of devising the business strategy and then a product strategy to support the business. 

Although a leap for now, this is definitely coming as well. Maybe AI isn’t the CEO and CCO but more like a business consulting firm such as McKinsey, Bain, or BCG. In fact, our scenario highlights that AI might have a more meaningful impact on the business consulting world than the product development companies themselves. 

Business majors should be on notice. 

The domain “freakthefishout.com” has been purchased, and the website has been created along with a full set of social media accounts. We’ve generated a baseline of video and visual content with you as hero figure for each of those accounts. We highlight the excitement of the launch of your product and company but contrast it with the content that resonates with your audience, which tends towards introversion, outdoor pursuits, and a requirement of trustworthiness. We gathered enough video of you from our initial conversation to generate the first 30 days of content. We’ll ask for another conversation with you in two weeks so that we can generate the second 30 days’ worth of content. The social media campaign will continue for the next 60 days, as defined in your introductory AutoBizInABox plan, and can be extended indefinitely with follow-on plans. 

The domain, website, and social media account creation for a basic product business like this is, like the legal and financial pieces, straightforward and cookie-cutter. AI could even write the code and make the desirable customizations required for the marketing strategy it has devised. 

You’re now hearing about the wonderful world of AI-generated video content. Sora and deepfakes, etc. And maybe that scares the bejesus out of you.

You can relax. This part of the scenario is quite far off. 

Yes, to some extent, it’s here or very close, but fully automated, realistic content with you as the star, is much farther off. The deepfake stuff that you see today is a human-intense exercise. AI is just the skill that makes it possible. 

Sora is currently generating some interesting video, but its wholly fiction. It’s not accurately generating real people, places, and things. Certainly nothing like capturing someone’s likeness and using that to create. This is theoretically possible but maybe practically impossible for a long time.  

The more interesting use of AI here is to make decisions about the audience. Those decisions tie to an overall product and marketing strategy and guidance that AI formed itself. It’s not exactly an automation use case of AI, but it’s a decision-making use case that’s coming as well. 

“FreakTheFishOut, LLC has been created with you as the founder and sole operator. Your federal EIN number is 12-3456789, and business checking and credit accounts have been created and connected to a bookkeeping and tax service that falls within your business case’s projected financial picture. We’ve pushed a mobile application to your devices for all financial transactions. You’ll find a founder gift of $100 in your business checking account as a thank-you for using AutoBizInABox.” 

AI could rather simply handle this entity law, banking, and accounting, with an interface to the government. 

Low-cost, vanilla entity creation services already exist through sites like LegalZoom and SwyftFilings. A couple of questions and a few clicks later, you have an LLC or S-Corp. To get the EIN, you use the IRS website. It also doesn’t take long, but I suspect there might be a human at the backend of this process because you can only get service during normal business hours. 

Once you have the EIN, you can setup your financial system with checking, credit, and tax services. Services like Found already exist to combine banking with bookkeeping and basic tax filing. 

All of these services already exist, so one part of the automation with AI is just connecting it all together—a true automation task. However, the other, more important piece is when AI doesn’t just create the infrastructure you tell it to but it decides what it should be based on the conversation you had at the beginning. Automation with AI might currently be closest to handling these pieces, but it’s certainly not there yet. 

The legal and financial decision-making and tasks required for this basic type of business is cookie-cutter and broadly applicable across most businesses of this type. If you currently work in any of these areas, AI is coming, and may replace the people that do the specific tasks in the near future. However, the connective tissue required to string all of this together is further off. 

But the basic legal, banking, and accounting professions should be on notice. 

Imagine you have an idea for a business. Let’s say you’ve developed an innovative fishing rig, and now you want to share it with the world (and get paid). 

So you go to “autobizinabox.com,” and a chatbot conducts about an hour-long conversation with you, asking you a million questions. Less than an hour later, you get a notification that says.

Congratulations Mr. Fancy Pants! 

FreakTheFishOut, LLC has been created with you as the founder and sole operator. Your federal EIN number is 12-3456789, and business checking and credit accounts have been created and connected to a bookkeeping and tax service that falls within your business case’s projected financial picture. We’ve pushed a mobile application to your devices for all financial transactions. You’ll find a founder gift of $100 in your business checking account as a thank-you for using AutoBizInABox. 

The domain “freakthefishout.com” has been purchased, and the website has been created along with a full set of social media accounts. We’ve generated a baseline of video and visual content with you as the hero figure for each of those accounts. We highlight the excitement of the launch of your product and company but contrast it with the content that resonates with your audience, which tends towards introversion, outdoor pursuits, and a requirement of trustworthiness. We gathered enough video of you from our initial conversation to generate the first 30 days of content. We’ll ask for another conversation with you in two weeks so that we can generate the second 30 days’ worth of content. The social media campaign will continue for the next 60 days, as defined in your introductory AutoBizInABox plan, and can be extended indefinitely with follow-on plans. 

In addition to the website and social media content, we’ve generated a social media and web advertising strategy, and the first ads will start to run today at 6 pm. These ads draw the engagers to the top of the sales funnel that we’ve connected to your entire online presence. We’ve created a strategic communication campaign that resonates with your target audience and reuses much of the content they’ll see on your social media to ensure continuity and build the trust they require. In compliance with the marketing strategy and business objectives, we’ve set a pricing structure that requires two versions of your product with slightly different feature sets for each. This varies from your original idea of a single product but will result in a better overall product strategy and pave the way for follow-on products in the future. We’ve named your products the “BassBlaster Pro” and “BassBlaster+” and have adjusted your product definitions accordingly. 

We’ve generated a set of technical drawings and specifications for your products, forwarded these to a manufacturer that meets specifications, and created the distribution pipeline. You were hoping for a same-day service from order through shipping, but the cost analysis, considering pricing and manufacturing, doesn’t support it. The manufacturer we’ve chosen to support the business case will manufacture-on-demand and has indicated that each product will require 14 hours to build. Therefore, we cannot guarantee same-day shipping for your customers, but we can guarantee next-day shipping. The manufacturer has locations in Brazil and Mexico, so 2nd-day arrival can be guaranteed for US customers but not European and Asian customers. We know this does not meet your original intentions, but given the business case, this is the best financial scenario for you.

Congratulations again! We love helping human innovators such as yourself realize their dream of bringing human ideas to fruition. 

We suggest you hop onto freakthefishout.com and see all that you’ve brought forth into the world…

AI like ChatGPT is now creeping into the Organizational Augmentation world. 

Organizational augmentation is like outsourcing a skillset or having an excellent assistant. They’re not totally autonomous, but they do a lot by themselves without you needing to get involved. You set the rules and expectations, and they do the work. Plus, you’ve empowered them to make some decisions on your behalf, but staying with the guidelines you’ve set up. 

Organizations and teams start to feel some benefits here.

The Helpdesk is a great example. If you train an LLM on your stuff, it can effectively hold a conversation about it with humans. Even as that conversation twists and turns around an unknown number of curves. If the training data is sufficient, the chatbot can keep up.

The virtual graduate assistant is another example. You can offload a specific task, such as analyzing data to find trends, researching and summarizing prior art, or even interpreting legal briefs. 

But organizational augmentation comes with a required expertise and a financial cost. 

It requires programming your own application and incurs a dynamic cost across the interface to the LLM. To bring virtual bots into your workflow or team, you must use the LLM’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Which means, “you have to write your own code to create the bot.” And you have to pay for every piece of information you send and receive to the LLM. More data == more cost.

Organizational automation is where it starts. Maybe you need less helpdesk people. Maybe you need two grad assistants instead of three. Maybe you don’t need to hire out some specific task.

But at the end of the day, the effect is minimal.

Next, we’ll look at the holy grail — Autonomous Automation.

The first level of automation is Personal Automation.

Personal automation devices allow you to do your work faster, more accurately, and more effectively and do multiple things simultaneously. The electric drill and dishwasher are personal automation devices. Basically, they allow you to do something faster or more accurately and/or do something else while the machine performs the task.

Personal automation makes you more productive and generally happier. But you’re still intimately involved in the input and outcome. It’s like having to micromanage the shitty intern, but when properly directed, that intern is very helpful.

The drill hasn’t put any construction workers out of a job. No restaurant manager has fired the human who washes dishes because they bought a dishwasher machine. Both of these tools enhance those people’s contribution to the organization, but the organization isn’t materially benefitting beyond your uptick in productivity and happiness.

This is where AI, like ChatGPT, currently lives. You can offload tasks like editing your writing, creating ideas, summarizing TLDRs, creating code and script snippets, analyzing data, and generating images. It’s very helpful to you, the person, but you’re still required.

Like the electric drill, it’s not putting anybody out of work.

Next, we’ll look at the genre of automation that AI is starting to poke into — Partial Automation.

I see fear-mongering about AI all over the place. 

People worried about their jobs and their place in the world because of AI’s ability to automate. To be fair, some of this is warranted, i.e., AI automation will replace people in some roles. Including in my orbit directly. But let’s give it some context.

First, automating people out of jobs has been going on for 100’s of years through the introduction of machines into the workforce. Machines don’t get tired, have the strength of thousands of people, and can do the same thing repetitively with great precision. Nothing about the current wave of automation fear is novel or scarier than when machines joined the workforce. 

Second, as with the introduction of machines, certain activities and jobs are more exposed than others. The current fear-inducing AI, ChatGPT, and its competitors are a type of AI called “large language models.” 

“An LLM is akin to a vast library staffed by an incredibly fast and knowledgeable librarian. Just as this librarian can sift through thousands of books to provide information, summarize stories, or answer questions based on the content of those books, an LLM scans its extensive database of text from the internet to generate responses, make predictions, and understand context in a way that mimics human conversation and writing.”

The previous paragraph shows you what an LLM can do. ChatGPT wrote it. I asked it: “Describe what an LLM is in a couple sentences with an analogy.”

So, an LLM is good at certain types of writing. An LLM is also good at a few other things, such as generating images (and soon video) and writing code. 

So where does that leave you and me, and will AI automation put us out of a job?

As someone who works in both software development and automation (both squarely in the sights of AI), I have a unique perspective. I see three broad levels of automation:

• Personal automation
• Organizational augmentation
• Autonomous automation

Over the next several days we’ll take a look at these, what they mean, and how AI fits into each.

“We’ll just use AI for that!”

Heard that this week. And I heard something that sounded exactly like it in 1997: “We’ll just use the internet for that!”

It’s a great marketing pitch. It’s a great pitch from the CEO or the COO. It’s a great pitch for your social media feed or a TEDx talk.

But currently, just like in 1997 with the internet, that’s a meaningless, confusing, or possibly scary statement. It’s just buzzwords. Anybody can say it. Anybody can theorize ways to use AI. Most don’t really know what it means, what it can and can’t do, and how to make it do anything.

Which creates quite the opportunity for us humans. Just like in 1997.