Why every company will have an "AI Productivity" team

Implementing AI in your company processes and workflows is a full-time job

Feb 09, 2024

Welcome back to Year 2049, your source of practical insights, case studies, and resources to help you embrace and harness the power of AI in your life, work, and business.

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From AI excitement to implementation

If last year was the year of AI excitement, this year is the year of AI experimentation and implementation inside each company.

One of the biggest areas of opportunity for AI is enhancing and augmenting internal business processes and workflows. Sure, there are many opportunities to integrate it into customer-facing applications, but this can go hilariously wrong.

The uncertainties around AI’s reliability and quality of outputs make it a perfect candidate for internal experimentation, where the risks and consequences aren’t detrimental.

But, there’s still a lot of time and effort required to find the right opportunities to pursue when trying to enhance or automate internal processes. I even think it’ll become a full-time job for some people.

These people will form an internal AI Productivity team.

They’ll be multi-disciplinary and look similar to your typical Product team:

UX Researchers → to interview employees and understand their pain points and needs during their day-to-day work.
UX Designers → to prototype and design solutions using tools like Custom GPTs, Zapier, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and other upcoming tools.
Prompt Engineer → to experiment, build, and document prompts to be used by employees. I also think there’s an opportunity for Prompt Engineers and UX Designers to work together on building specialized interfaces that minimize the need for prompting.
AI/Software Engineers → to implement custom AI solutions and applications using OpenAI APIs or frameworks like LangChain.
Data Librarian → to gather, organize, and maintain the company’s knowledge base.

Of course, the team will also have a product manager, business analyst, and project manager.

The benefits of an AI Productivity team

Over the past year, I’ve spoken to many people and companies who are trying to leverage AI to work faster and more efficiently.

For now, all of these efforts are “side of desk” work that doesn’t get the attention it needs, partially because day-to-day work has a clear business benefit (it keeps the lights on). It’s also a rough economy for significant investments into something that may or may not work, and where loads of concerns around privacy and security still exist.

We should still acknowledge some of the potential benefits of having an internal AI Productivity team:

Make a company’s knowledge base evergreen: as companies keep growing and completing more work, their knowledge base keeps expanding to the point where it becomes chaotic to find what you need.
Connecting various data sources: tasks, documents, and other information are typically spread out across various applications. Frameworks like LangChain finally allow you to connect different data sources and build a single “brain” of information.
Make work easier and faster by removing friction: they could also make it easier for people to do their work and remove the daily frustrations of information overload or trying to find that one document that an ex-employee worked on 2 years ago.

When companies start realizing the upside of having a dedicated team focused on enhancing internal processes with AI, they’ll look at it as a worthy investment.

What I’m working on to help with this

I’m combining my background in industrial engineering, human-centered design, and AI engineering to build a course with frameworks and in-depth tutorials on creating custom AI assistants and automations with no code using tools like Custom GPTs, Zapier, and more.

I’m still designing the course structure, but I would love to hear your thoughts if you’re someone who would benefit from this. As a reward, you’ll get 50% off whatever I end up making:

Build custom AI assistants with no code

🎥 Videos of the Week

🤖 OpenAI is building AI agents (TikTok | Instagram)

🥽 I unboxed my (totally-not-fake) Apple Vision Pro (TikTok | Instagram)

🧠 How to start building your AI knowledge for $0 (TikTok | Instagram)

👀 Things that caught my eye

Hugging Face launches open-source AI assistant maker to rival OpenAI’s custom GPTs (VentureBeat)
Google Bard becomes Gemini… and it’s finally available in Canada! (Google)
OpenAI Shifts AI Battleground to Software That Operates Devices, Automates Tasks (The Information)
Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs (404)