How can you leverage Generative AI to get the insightful and immediate answers you need to provide the best service for your customers?
Paul Baier, CEO and principal analyst at GAI Insights, will answer that question in his upcoming presentation at Applied AI for Distributors, June 4-6, 2024, in Chicago. He’ll focus on how to choose a generative AI model, how to train it on your data and what you can expect to get from this investment.
He’s also leading a hands-on workshop on June 4 to help sales professionals ramp up their productivity with ChatGPT. During that workshop, he’ll provide 25 powerful prompts and share practical use cases for sales.
Baier is a seasoned software entrepreneur with two decades of experience, most notably as vice president of product at First Fuel, an enterprise AI SaaS company. He earned an MBA from Harvard and a BA from Kenyon College. Baier co-authored two Harvard Business Review articles about GenAI: “Where Should Companies Start with GenAI?” and “Your Organization Isn’t Designed to Work with GenAI.”
Distribution Strategy Group: How do you view Generative AI and GenAI tools like ChatGPT? What role can and should they play in a business?
Paul Baier: These are tools. Cars are tools, knives are tools, and if you use them correctly, you’ll be fine. If you use them incorrectly, you’ll find ways to hurt your business and yourself. The good news is, in general, the risk we’re talking about is around confidential information. We can use these robots as thought partners that are very powerful.
DSG: Thought partners?
Baier: Yes, everyone now has a thought partner 24/7. Everyone is empowered with a graphic artist, a brainstorming person, a grammar person, a librarian. It’s a thousand interns at your fingertips. They bring information to your desk, but you need to do the last mile. You’ll never have an intern write a report or press release. So that’s the metaphor.
And the other metaphor is that if you hired someone to redo your kitchen and you came home and they were manually drilling holes, you’d ask, “Why aren’t you using a power drill?” It’s the same thing. So Generative AI is a power tool for knowledge work. Just as today we rarely use physical maps to try to get around Denver because we have a GPS map tool. It’s just up a level. We still have to decide where to go. These are tools that radically improve productivity.
DSG: Do distributors still have a lot of misconceptions about AI?
Baier: Oh, everyone does. It’s changed so fast. It’s hard not to. And on top of that, it’s an emotional issue. And what sells on the clickbait media is AI is going to kill us all. AI is going to take over the world. But it’s like swimming. You can’t learn about this in a 30-minute YouTube. You need to go do it. You need to put in your 20 hours, you need to find a use case, you need to think about it and then sleep on it. You need to get your head around this thing. It’s like this universal super tool from the future, and it’s here now.
DSG: Do you have tips for effectively integrating this technology into your business?
Baier: Step one: Everybody on the Board and management team needs to put a few hours into using ChatGPT. I don’t care what the use case is, but you need to get yourself into this world. So, that’s the first thing.
Second, you need to understand the scary things to get ahead of. And you need to have an employee use policy. 99% of employees want to do the right thing. You haven’t told them what the right thing is. “Can I use ChatGPT – Yes or No?”
Third is you want to find and support the Generative AI rebels. These are 5% to 10% of your people who love to learn, who are heat seekers, who want to learn the tool because a sweet spot is the overlap between understanding your use cases at your company and the enthusiasts. They’re going to find it. You want to find them, you want to support them, and you want to make them heroes.
And the last thing is you need to understand that this, at a high level, is just yet another technology that’s accelerating a digital transformation. Figure out what your business strategy is, figure out where digital transformation has the highest impact in your three-year business plan and then prioritize how you invest scarce dollars and time into that.
DSG: Why should distributors attend Applied AI for Distributors?
Baier: First and foremost, let’s understand that at least a 20% to 30% productivity improvement can happen today with your outside and inside salespeople. Distribution is sales. It’s still face-to-face in many situations. You can have a transformative impact on your productivity with these tools. Come with a learning mindset.
DSG: What message do you want people to take away from your presentation at Applied AI for Distributors?
Paul Baier: We’re going to be walking through why this is truly transformational in the next six to nine months for most businesses. And we’re going to give you a framework for how to understand how this will impact your industry, your company and your particular job.
The second thing is we’re going to demystify a lot of this and actually get hands on keyboards. I’m going to spend about 20 minutes doing ChatGPT prompts, taking questions from audiences and showing you how to set up conversations, how to analyze a contract, how to analyze an RFP and how to do a customized value proposition for your sales customers.
And the last third we’re going to talk about is what we do now with all this change and more change coming? How do we build organizations that are adaptive and learning? How do we build a reward system that’s attracting people who are enthusiastic about this? Because the top talent knows this is the biggest career accelerant ever. How much you learn about this in the next three or four years is going to reflect your ability to be hired, your promotability, and how much you earn and make. And if you don’t provide a work environment to embrace this, you will lose your top talent.
