Workshops

It takes years to master data and information technology. Now there is AI! What people should learn about AI is extensive. AI is in its infancy, and we are only beginning to experience benefits from amazing new applications. Subject matter material listed below represents a small fraction of what you can learn about AI to improve how you live and work. Living Smart with Heart is clearly a great starting point, but when you are ready to take a deep dive into AI, you should consider other ways to learn. We develop workshops and podcasts tailored to meet needs and interests of partners and customers.

AI & The Human Element
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is technology and logic created to improve how people and things work. AI is the product of intelligent algorithms. Logic is programmed into algorithms designed to discover and interpret anomalies, patterns, variations, and similarities in information to support learning and power applications. AI can simulate how humans think, feel and act. The objective is to augment what people need to do. Ethics are very important, AI should help people to do the right things. Remember the human element, what people do each day matters.

Business of Knowing
Do you know where information to power ChatGPT, Google AI (Bard) and other AI Chatbots comes from? The Internet is a vast resource. One problem today is the worldwide spread of bad data, bias and misleading information. What if you need information that is not on the Internet? How do you know if AI Chatbots will produce “accurate” information? Unfortunately, bias and self-interests have influenced the reporting of factual data and information. Rampant growth of misinformation is everywhere. You cannot believe everything you see and hear. AI is powerful and needs to be harnessed in the right ways. Tools like AI Chatbots can be extremely useful in helping people author data and information. How these new applications will impact learning in schools could be challenging. Increasing the dissemination of biased and untruthful information should be of great concern to everyone.

Value Creation
Decisions have lasting effects. It is always good to get decisions right the first time around. Who you are, what you do, what you need and what you want will influence how you make decisions. You need reliable data and information to make good decisions. Value Creation is a “successive” process that represents the value of things that people build or develop. A formula that measures value creation provides vital insight that people can use to evaluate benefits linked to activities or experiences. Some activities create more value than others. Do you know which ones? You should! Assessing the value of all the things you do each day helps people identify with activities that create more value than others.

Baseline Analytics
Businesses generate and collect all kinds of information based on operations. Information on industries and markets, product and services, sales and marketing, customer service, etc. is available everywhere. You can extract data from systems and applications. You can also find almost anything on the Internet. The problem for businesses is that many performance-based analytics are dated or missing. Core metrics businesses need to measure data and information development are not common. Baseline data should be used to measure worker performance to evaluate operations. Worker performance models must measure how people organize and engage to create value. Businesses need to benchmark activity-based performance to develop predictive insight to power AI applications.

Corporate DNA
The essence of every business is people. Understanding what workers do each day is important. Today, so many things are taken for granted. No two things that people do each day are the same. There is variation in everything we do. To capture the essence of a business, it is best to model how individuals live and work each day. There is also need to understand how people work together and make decisions that impact business value creation. Do you have knowledge worker activity models? What distinguishes one person from another? What activities are most important to measure? Businesses, especially high-tech companies with lots of knowledge workers, need DNA based intelligence to measure actual value creation.

Decision Framework
Business transformation is complex. If a business expects to modernize operations with AI, it is important to have a well-thought-out strategy for managing change. This easier said than done. Transformation is a successive process that evolves and should be managed with the help of a decision framework – a conceptual model or structure used to develop and integrate data and information. Experience comes through successive effort when you do things over and over again to optimize outcomes. Most businesses dive into projects without having sufficient information to measure step-change performance. A good decision framework will help an organization generate important data and information to manage transformation with AI.

Renewal & Reuse
Value creation is the function of how people work together to develop product and service offerings. Product development is a complicated process that begins and ends based on the life cycle of a particular product. Opportunity to develop a strategic development cycle to manage product development is not new. What is new is the shift from a growth to renewal model to manage product design and development. What differs is upfront thinking about waste as a by-product at the end of a product development cycle. Renewal can also apply to information in terms of designing for reuse – design once for use in multiple formats and applications. The Earth has a limited supply of resources. Designing for renewal and reuse is vital for the future.