Well, Hi everyone, this is my kinda party 🎉
For those who don't know me, I am long ago ex-PeopleSoft, forever committed to user experience and a pioneer in the AI space with Oracle (we were using ODA before it was even GA). The last five years I have accumulated a lot of blood, sweat and tears and I hope to share a bit of each of those with you along the way 😄 . Not to plug, but I do write a blog on AI with Enterprise Software as the lens. I try to keep this all about the industry and our research and little about our own products. Check it out here: https://intrasee.com/tag/ai/
Here are some current thoughts about where we are in the market right now. A stream of consciousness really...
I believe web pages are the dead walking, but I am sure searching is on borrowed time
Reading, scrolling, clicking, loading, searching, menus....it's all a pain really. Now multiply that pain by the 20 SaaS apps most employees/students use. The future is where our computers understand us, and not us understanding their web pages. What will replace Gen2 Enterprise Software, aka the cloud? Well, maybe it is something you don't expect with no web pages at all. And maybe it is closer than you think.
It is not which AI you should pick, it is which AIs you should mix
I believe we are headed for a mixing or blending of AI models. Even GPT-4o, released this last week, is exactly that. Not one big monolithic model, rather speciality models and general models all working together. LLMs alone aren't the answer. Traditional AI alone isn't the answer. To me, it is all about the right tool for the job and do it with minimum friction to the user. That is where we are going and I think the market will too.
LLM+RAG is not the savior we have been told
You can read more about this on the blog I mentioned, but LLMs and RAG have flaws. In some cases they are 0% correct. They can make stuff up and that is a liability you should carefully manage. I would never suggest just throwing GPT4 up on your website and hope for the best. For example, this method does not handle user segmentation or personalization very well (again, there is a blog post on this). In the Enterprise, roles are important. Even when we are accessing public information, the answer to questions are different based on your persona. Graduates and undergraduates don't have the same tuition, for example! Do you trust LLM+RAG to figure that out? I suggest you don't.
Well, I digress...let me try to chime in on the questions at hand.
What AI? For us, it is all about digital assistants. More than chat, help make people's day's easier. Answer questions in 2 seconds rather than waiting for over 27 hours (per Gartner that's the average Higher Ed response time). Student assistance with personalization is the most popular use of AI we see today. We have a recent customer who saw their call volume drop 40% and email by 66%. Holy cow! And that is not just good for reducing human load, but it is a better experience because students get answers in seconds. It doesn't stop at students either. Faculty and staff are using the same technology. I asked a client recently about these call/email reductions expecting her to tell me about the ROI achieved in cost reduction, but I got a very different answer. She said someone who needed extra help she used to spend 2 or 3 mins with and would point them in a direction. Some of these students were first generation college students or English wasn't their first language. This year she spent over 20 minutes on these cases. That is 10x the service. She was able to give that personal attention where it was needed most and she had more time because the automation of the AI gave her that time. Amazing. What is the easiest counter to the Enrollment Cliff? Keeping more of the students you already have.
Most excited? There will be a world where none of us have to enter data into fields on a web page just tabbing along. Imagine going to a bot and just uploading all your receipts and with one command it parses those, fills out my expense report for me, which is then auto-approved by AI because it is likely to meet the policy criteria and I am paid back the next day. I am so ready for this.
Challenges? First and foremost, AI marketing is confusing and noisy. There is no easy button despite how automatic it is made to sound. For AI to work well, it needs humans. If you are putting no elbow grease into your AI or your data that it learns from, you should be worried. It is very hard to tell what makes all these AI products different. Usually the most important questions aren't even getting asked. For example, who trains the AI? Where does my data go? You would be surprised at how these models are trained and how they use your data.
Well, that is it for now. Happy AI'ing and I will be around if you have any questions.
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Andrew Bediz
Managing Director AI & UX
Gideon Taylor
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Message from the HEUG Marketplace:
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Find, Review, and Engage with Higher Education-focused solution providers, products, and services using the HEUG Marketplace.
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-20-2024 08:21 AM
From: Heidi Ptack
Subject: Let's Get the Ball Rolling!
Hello!
We are excited to start launching this NEW HEUG AI Innovators Network, and we'd love for you to join in on the conversation first.
AI is everywhere, and we want to hear how you and your organization are leveraging it. Let's get the ball rolling with a discussion post and explore the diverse applications and impacts of AI together.
Let's dive into the discussion with these starter questions:
- How is AI currently being used in your organization, and what outcomes have you observed?
- What innovative AI projects are you most excited about, and why?
- What are some common challenges in AI adoption, and how have you addressed them?
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Heidi Ptack
Senior Community Manager
Higher Education User Group
202-400-3518 ex.1010
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Message from the HEUG Marketplace:
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Find, Review, and Engage with Higher Education-focused solution providers, products, and services using the HEUG Marketplace.
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