Mind Readings: Templates are Generative AI Goldmines

In today's episode, let's talk about the gold mine for generative AI use cases. Where is that? What is the gold mine? How do we know where generative AI is going to make a huge difference right away? The gold is where the templates are.

Back in 2015 and 2016, I used to say this to my AI keynotes back in the days when we were doing AI talks that had no generative in them. It was just classical AI. I used to say this is I would say, if you do it with the template today, a machine does it with it without you tomorrow. If you do it with a template today, a machine does it without you tomorrow. This is now more true than ever.

Generative AI allows us to handle unstructured templates, templated tasks with ease. Like summarize this meeting, write this email, make a blog post, right? Unstructured tasks, but highly repetitive, and there's a template. Hey, here's a template for a blog post. Here's the template for their staff meeting notes.

So when someone asks, you know, where do you find the opportunities for generative AI use cases? My answer is simple. It's wherever your the most templates are in your organization. For most companies, most marketing departments, that's in marketing operations. You have a template for a client report, you have a template for an RFP response, you have a template for uh a press release, you have a template for an expense report.

And chances are, chances are just reading the names of those templates, at least one of them gave you a visceral response. Ugh. Expense reports, right? Customer service tickets, annual reviews. Ugh.

This is something that Katie Robert and I talk about a lot. The use cases for generative AI vastly exceed, you know, write me a blog post. So that's like taking a uh a Harrier to the grocery store. Like, yes, it can do that, but it's a gross underuse of its capabilities. Generative AI is capable of incredible tasks.

And the easiest ones to figure out where are things are templated and things make you go ugly. If it's a template today, you should convert it for use with generative AI today so that you're the one operating the machinery tomorrow. You are the one who is getting that work done still, but you do it with a machine. And you do it faster and you do it better and you do it cheaper. Otherwise, your organization will at some point do that task with or without you because the efficiencies are too good to ignore.

Any rational organization is going to look at the efficiencies of generative AI and say, we need to get on board. Generative AI's most powerful use cases for saving time and saving money are going to be in operations, marketing operations, financial operations, operations in general. Why? Because unlike that blog post that you're trying to write with ChatGPT, operation stuff is largely internal. There are far fewer issues with permissions and copyright and contracts and work for hire, etc.

No one is critiquing the artfulness of your expense report, right? Frankly, there should be no creativity in the expense report. Um no one cares how original your prose is on your monthly activity summary. No one is going to challenge the copyright on a customer service call summary or notes in your CRM. And the time savings of turning these templates into generative AI actions are going to be massive.

You know this already, just by your your reaction to the names of these templates. Very few people are excited to complete an expense report. Very few people are excited to write up a call summary. Most people would be okay handing that off to an assistant. They would cheer handing that off to a machine, which means it's going to get done faster, it's going to get done more correctly and more thoroughly, which for anything in operations, that is a huge win.

So wherever the templates are in your organization today, that's where your biggest wins in generative AI are going to be today and tomorrow. Get started. Find those opportunities, find those templates, and start automating them right now. That's gonna do it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in.

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