"Supercharge your meetings" and more
This is the last free post this week. There will be one more post tomorrow for premium subscribers (I will send a preview). Friday is the last day to get (lifetime) 50% off Marketing BS premium. After Friday the price will be $100/year. At $50/year that is only 50-cents per premium post (or 25-cents if you include the good will from the free posts). I sure hope I am creating that much value. If not you probably shouldn’t even be spending the time to read these… You time is worth more than that! Onto the post.
Generative AI has clearly been exploding, but most executives I know are barely using it, if at all. A select few are playing around with it for personal use. I still don’t know personally any companies that are using it at scale for content generation (they should be!). It feels like it is going to change everything, but how does one even get started in an enterprise setting?
As I have thought more about what I want to do with this newsletter when it comes to AI, I have landed on this:
I am not going to be the best place to hear about the latest AI news or research or even products. That niche is well served (Ben’s Bites, The Neutron, and The AI Exchange being a few of the big ones, along with every second other newsletter these days it seems…). When I think I can be helpful and unique is in writing about how some of the latest tools can be used right now for a CMO. It’s all fine and good when a company shows potential, but most CMOs don’t have time for experiments that are likely to fail. You have other things to do that are more pressing and impactful. If some new tool is mind-blowingly awesome and will change everything, you should be fine to wait a month or two.
Some posts like this:
I want to share a few more tools I have come across since the last time I made a post like this:
Website design
CodeDesign.ai is a tool for making websites in natural language. I spent some time this week trying to code a product directly from ChatGPT. It works, but it is still not easy. You have to be very careful what you ask for. In the first attempt we ended up creating a chatbot that lived directly on my personal laptop harddrive (so it turned off when I closed the laptop), and had started down the path of removing the “container” that protected it from the rest of my files (Getting the container set up was proving difficult so I asked it if there was a way to do it without the container. It said, “sure there was” and proceeded to walk me through how to open up all my files to anyone who wanted to hack my bot…). Products like Code Design reduce the flexibility, but dramatically increase the speed of coding within the parameters they limit themselves to. It’s like a “no code” tool on top of the generative AI capabilities.
Meetings
Microsoft is going to roll out Co-pilot for teams that will summarize and provide takeaway for meetings over the Teams interface. In the meantime there are tools that will transcribe your Zoom meetings and (in theory) provide takeaways. Dive is a product that attempts to take it to the next level. It integrates with Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom (not Teams). It it trying to be the one-stop tool across the “meeting lifecycle”:
Meeting prep
Meeting note taking
Auto creation and assignment of action items
Meeting insight summary
Meeting recaps (sent directly to inboxes)
I expect tools like this to be useful for individual meetings, but the real power will come when they are used across an entire organization. Then you can get targeted summary of summaries and see what is happening everywhere that related to you and your team. The big question is whether Microsoft will have a version of this with their copilot and make these start-ups obsolete. (In the meantime, if you start using one of these, please let me know how it is going).
Enterprise AI
I mentioned Bearly in an earlier write-up. I have since met with the CEO and I think it is worth calling out their value proposition. Bearly is a wrapper on top of GPT-4. It has a copied interface of ChatGPT that works the same way the OpenAI tool does (identical in every way). But it also has other features that I think would be helpful for a company or organization:
Pre-written prompts: If you haven’t used AI then you may be disappointed with your first results. Output is very dependent on what you input for your prompt. Bearly has done some of that work and has pre-written prompts for common use cases that just require fill-in-the-blank with your specific need.
Prompt Marketplace: Once you know how to write prompts you will find some you will want to use over and over again (with variations). You can save them into an enterprise-wide “marketplace”. You can get easy access, as can anyone within your organization.
Document summary: You can upload a document and it will provide a summary. Coming soon is the ability to query and ask questions dynamically about a document. Example use case is a leasing company that needs to review 40-page leases to very what they have committed to.
Images: The tool has an image generator powered by both Stable Diffusion and Dall-e (not MidJourney). The new SD model is much better, and some say as good as the MJv5, but I am skeptical. In any case, having an image generator build into and bundled with the product is handy.
Enterprise Tools: Things like single sign-on that are handy for larger organizations
They have more features coming soon (including meeting transcription and summaries). But the best part is their pricing. It is only $20/month/user - which is the same price as subscribing directly to ChatGPT. You get a mirror of ChatGPT PLUS the other features. Seems like a no-brainer for most organizations, and I am recommending them now for the Warburg portfolio.
Keep it simple,
Edward