When people think about using AI it gets daunting, what can I use it for, how can it help me? What if you thought about AI as being a mentor instead of a technology? I think most people start the journey on the path to AI with a use case, the how do I do something, write a script, make an angry email sound a little softer but still get your point across. Sure its good for that, maybe not perfect but better than doing it all by yourself. I have found that AI is more powerful when you use it as digital mentor.

Guard Rails: AI will train itself based on the data provided. What this means is that it will take your data and use it to learn. While this is powerful and overall helps the quality of the data it is basing its answers on, it will use that data for others. A good practice is to clean your data of an identifiable markers. Remove names, addresses, social security numbers etc… Pretty much anything that you wouldn’t sit on a park bench. You can also use AI’s, such as Microsoft CoPilot, which can be trained on company data but in a bubble protecting you from data leakage that could be detrimental to your business. Locking down results to only data that a user has access to, makes things such as payroll and other identifiable data accessible by users with the rights to access it.

Your AI journey: When you start using AI, most people start with a simple ask, a sentence, maybe a paragraph. When you give AI the full context and are specific on your ask, your results are much better. I have some examples below:

• Sentence: Write a script that creates a conference room in M365.
• Paragraph: Write a script that creates a conference room in M365. I want to set the location, how many users the room can handle, and a room manager that can move or delete meetings. This should be a cloud only conference room with no AD sync. I would like to use a .csv file to create the room based on fields in the .csv.
• Contextual: I am an IT professional and I need a script to that allows users to create a conference room with the following format based on input from a .csv. It should base it off a field call confrmname and take a generic name such as NewConfRoom and have the displayname and name fields changed to follow this format: NewConfRoom-Video the other fields I would like are for the room manager labeled as rmmgr that can add or remove meetings, a field called capacity that is numeric that allows me to set the capacity and a field called location that I can put the physical location of the conference room in. I want this to be easy to update so let me know if there is a way that I can either use a .csv or if one is not provided that it ask me the questions to create the room using a similar format.

In any case it will create a script to do what you asked for. You may have some cleanup to do but the more details you can provide, the less you have to fix. You can also use AI as a life coach, a business mentor, a financial advisor etc.. the key is that you are in control and if it sounds off, well it probably is. You just need to refine your question so it knows what you are talking about. You need to learn to speak AI which sucks at first. Don’t get frustrated, its a new thing but learning to harness the power of AI can mean the difference between having an edge or living on the edge.

AI is in my opinion a technology that is as awesome as the internet, when I started in IT we did everything using WIKI’s if they existed, otherwise we banged our head on the keyboard until we figured it out. With the internet there came additional complexity but at the same time millions of people putting the collective knowledge on the web for anyone to consume. Then came YouTube, with tutorials on how to do things with a video showing the step by step directions on how to do it right…. or at least good enough. AI is the culmination of this shared knowledge. Now with the vast amounts of information, its hard to find the things that matter and also be able to learn quickly how to do difficult things easily. Learn to speak AI, learn to leverage AI responsibly, and get a competitive edge on the folks that are fighting against the technology and its potential.