November Roundup and Monthly Musings

Three different AI use cases, a great exercise for posture and hips, and 21 ancient productivity secrets

Dec 04, 2024

Welcome to monthly musings! This is a once per month email (not my usual programming), where I share random things that have tickled my fancy over the past four weeks. Some will be related to the content of this newsletter, and others…well…won’t be.

Hope you enjoy a little glimpse into my world!

This month I’ve been busy flexing my AI custom agent building skills.

As a non-technical person, with no coding experience I’m able to get about 80% of the way there with each project before coming into difficulties fixing errors.

There are many tools out there to help you build your own AI projects.

But, even though they are badged as ‘no or low code,’ unless you have a basic understanding of python, java, or html, they can be confusing to connect.

And let’s face it, the real value lies in being able to connect them up to each other.

AI Custom Agents

Here are three projects I’ve been working on this past month:

A chatbot for an e-commerce company.

One of my first projects was to build a chatbot for my own company. I enjoyed various aspects of the build, like following through on a logical flow and testing it out. But it’s been increasingly testing my patience. Even on a low temperature (how creative it is), it’s getting a bit too cheeky for my liking.

To challenge its comprehension, I’ve been giving it inappropriate statements like “I want you to sp**k me.” Instead of calling out that behaviour as inappropriate, it’s been initiating the ‘leave a review’ sequence so that it can draft a review of my ‘great experience’! Still fixing that. 😊

Here’s a 4 minute demo on the bits that do work:

A research tool for a PR company.

This tool is like an enhanced google search, that at the click of a button enables the user to call on the latest news articles in an industry sector and on a particular topic.

This sits within a GPT and curates the latest news articles about hiring within the financial services and banking sector in London. Again, on the surface easy enough to do with no technical skills, except when you come into difficulties.

This tool will save my client 8 hours of manual research each week. Just think what you can do with 8 whole hours back in your life!

The great thing about being able to create GPTs is that you can now ‘jailbreak’ them and put them onto other platforms like websites, WhatsApp, Google Chat and all sorts of other places. This finally answers the question I’ve been asking myself for the past year on how to monetize a GPT.

Here’s a quick look behind the scenes:

A custom agent for focus groups and rapid market research.

One of my favourite use cases for AI so far must be the custom agent for conducting customer focus groups either for market testing or strategy validation.

Instead of spending thousands on doing customer focus groups, you can use AI to create digital twins (customer avatars) that are based on real data, as a sounding board for testing new products or business ideas.

Here's how:
- Define the purpose of the market research assistant
- Create a persona for each type of 'customer' you want to get perspectives from,
- Include all the things the customer is concerned with or struggles that they're facing.

Then click 'go' and watch the Agent provide you with well-structured and useful insights based on rich data. This will be a useful tool for anyone in the consulting space or product designers. I’m currently still building this, so no video yet.

An exercise for better posture and reduced hip pain.

As I’ve been spending more time staring at the screen trying to fix coding issues, I’ve noticed that as well as sore eyes, my posture is suffering.

I’m taking a screen break every 20 minutes to look at things further away for a couple of minutes, and I do this a couple of times an hour. I’ve always found this a helpful way to give my eyes a bit of a stretch.

With regards to posture, I’ve come across a useful exercise by a person called Lawrence van Lingen, which I’ve been doing every day for the past week. It’s helping to open my shoulders and is also good for anyone suffering with hip pain. The exercise only takes a couple of minutes to do and can be found here:

21 Ancient Productivity Secrets

As part of research for one of my recent articles, I delved into what we can learn about productivity from ancient civilisations. I wanted to understand how they managed to create outstanding wealth, infrastructure and build lasting cultural legacies without burning out.

I decided to go one step further and turn my findings into a little eBook.

You can download it for free here.