5 key takeaways regarding AI and its implications for the industry

It’s market time, which even simply stating elicits floods of memories. A few of these echoes from High Points past feature a podium and me delivering one of IHFRA’s many Ted Talk-like presentations to smatterings of marketgoers over at the IHFC. 

It’s throwback Thursday, so pretend you’ve somehow ended up at one of those presentations, one on how AI can make your work easier, perhaps even fun. 

As we began the school year in late August, the topic none of us faculty types could stop talking about was AI. After a few years of quietly suspecting that our students were making wide use of AI in their submitted work, we seemed collectively to realize that some key decisions regarding its integration needed to be made. 

For me, the question came down to this: If colleges and universities are supposed to be incubators of new ideas, the foundries of creation for intellectual property and training grounds for the workforce of the future, we need not only to figure out how to police the use of AI, but how to teach and learn with it, as well. It is incumbent on us to model and to equip our students to ethically and responsibly collaborate with AI. 

Fortunately for us, to help kick off the new year, we had a visit from C. Edward Watson, vice president for digital innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. His workshop aimed to identify the implications of AI for higher education. 

“Could you please distill into five key takeaways the following transcript?”

“Of course! Here are five key takeaways regarding AI and its implications for industry.”

Like a good algorithm, I’ve filtered that daylong experience to produce a list of takeaways relevant to the home furnishings industry.

  • AI is the worst right now than it’s ever going to be.

With “worst” here referring to technological advancement and sophistication rather than morality, it is good to be reminded how deep into the trough of the hockey-stick-shaped learning curve most of us are, and that it’s only going to get better. 

As the charts below dramatically show, we are rushing to AI at rates and in numbers we haven’t seen before for big technological breakthroughs. Quoting surveys, Watson said 93% of polled employers say they expect to use AI in the next five years; 86% of all surveyed employees said the same. About three-quarters of us in higher ed say we’re already using it. 

“One hundred percent of jobs will change,” Watson told the faculty. “There is at least one task AI can do better or more quickly, not the whole job, but at least one task.”

From “Talking About AI: A Guide for Educators,” by Sidney Dobrin

Less than three years old as a category, AI generators have quickly become indispensable “partners” to which to outsource tedious work, among many other sorts of tasks. Correspondence, annual reports, presentation talking points, outlines, transcripts: There are so many time sucks that can be knocked out in minutes by even the free versions of these generators. And as in a virtuous spiral, they get better with use.

  • The question is, “How can we collaborate with AI to do more and to do more faster?”

Perhaps the day’s biggest takeaway for me was this notion of collaborating with AI rather than seeing it as a threat or disruptor. Watson got my attention with a slide showing AI able to detect 20% more cancers than conventional procedures or the doctors who use them, without generating false positives. AI could “read” MRI scans and detect aberrations more accurately and much more quickly than humans. This substantially better scorecard is evidence of the value of relationships with AI that partner us with it to do good.  

Similarly, and directly applicable in our industry, AI has been shown to outperform lawyers in finding issues or problems in contracts, and at a 99.97% reduction in cost. Your garden variety contract requires an average of 44 minutes to vet, which adds up to $76, compared to less than five minutes and roughly 25 cents for AI. Junior lawyers are good at identifying legal flaws or issues in the contracts, Watson reported, but not so good at seeing what is missing. AI does both. 

I know a lot of companies in our sector are already using AI in customer service, especially the dot-coms. Of course they are. AI out-performs humans in speed and customer satisfaction, and it is really good at triage, or assessing a problem and determining the necessary urgency of a response, including if and when to switch to human intervention. This quiet revolution will continue as chatbots, virtual assistants and other generative AI technologies report for work 24/7. According to Gartner Research, 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human by 2025.

  • All AI generators are not equal.

This is intuitive, I know, but I hadn’t given the growing variety of generators or their purported strengths and weaknesses much thought. And I had no idea just how vast this universe has so quickly become. Leading in the headlines was OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so that’s what I have been using. Watson identified a number of fairly different generators — I counted at least 26 — and highlighted a few for the kinds of tasks each could do especially well or notably less well. 

For example, for the kind of work I routinely do, I’ll need to check out Semantic Scholar, which can quickly identify research relevant to a particular query and provide summaries of that research. At the very top of my list, however, is Anthropic’s Claude.ai, a generator especially good at creative work, collaborative projects, computer coding, multilingual processing and developing training materials. Yes, please! It also promises expertise in data mining.

Related to this takeaway is the equally intuitive fact that the paid versions of these generators are vastly superior to their freebie versions. I can’t testify to this firsthand yet; I have yet to belly up to this particular bar. But, I know I will. I just need to do a bit more due diligence about which one to plunk down the money for (and which streaming service to drop to make up the difference). 

It is more than a rumor but less than a corroborated fact that the makers of these generators “dumb down” the free version primarily to incent us to pay for the superior engine. It makes sense, and the motivation ultimately doesn’t matter: We get what we pay for, or what we don’t pay for. 

  • It’s all about prompt engineering.

Making the most of AI generators is about crafting the best prompts, and like any new skill, this takes some time, trial and error, collaboration with those more advanced and just plain, simple curiosity. I’m getting better with each focused session, but I know I have a long way to go. The incentive, at least for me, is how quickly and substantively even a slight change in a prompt can improve the result. The generators themselves “want” better prompts, so I often include a prompt asking the engine for tips on crafting a better prompt on the specific topic or task. 

  • AI is changing our notions of “average.” 

It’s probably true that 90% of all writing is not great and that this percentage has held true across time, technologies, media and people groups. What the internet and its web did was to increase the total populations of good and bad writing. With the internet, it is still likely true that only about 10% of writing is better than meh, but the size of that 10% is so much larger than before the democratization of publishing. I’m betting the same will be true of AI adoption. If all or most of my students are using AI to check their grammar, spelling, etc., then the bar inevitably rises. “Average” is now a higher threshold.

Writing is just the example here. “Average” for the tasks your employees do, aided by AI, is rising relative to all of your competitors and the quality level of what their employees using AI are producing. As with most big moments in innovation, simply standing still is functionally the same as falling behind. 

I finished our workshop day pretty jacked about the ways I could start integrating AI into my teaching and learning even this semester. It felt a little like the moment Mom took the training wheels off of my bike and — wooooooo! — down the hill I flew. I hope this column has a similar effect for you. 

As Claude told me when I asked for a definition of AI literacy, it “empowers individuals to be informed, thoughtful and effective users of AI technologies across personal, professional and societal contexts. It helps ensure people can harness the benefits of AI while also navigating its complexities and limitations.”

Here’s to navigating this brave, new AI-aided world. I hope you have exactly the market experience you seek, one that is profitable in every way.

Brian Carroll

Brian Carroll covered the international home furnishings industry for 15 years as a reporter, editor and photographer. He chairs the Department of Communication at Berry College in Northwest Georgia, where he has been a professor since 2003.

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