Hi Alexandra
My team and I have been using AI now for 18 months and its role in our business is expanding each day. Initially, AI was used for as a productivity enhancer for drafting new content and summarizing existing content, like emails, documents, websites and so on. As our understanding of AI grew and we became better at prompting, we started using AI to do some research as well - market research, product research, finding facts and figures from publicly available materials, and using that research to draft our own internal market reports. The next level of sophistication for our company came when my team started using AI to create design documents for AI solutions that we wanted to develop, starting with Use Cases followed by functional and technical design documents. Here again, prompting played a major role. Just asking AI to write a design for a use case or a topic produced a very poor response. By elaborating our prompts, i.e. by using prompt engineering techniques like chain-of-thought, zero-shot, tree-of-thought, some-shot etc. using ails, letters, summarization day to day productivity, and by sharing examples of past design documents, we were able to train the model to develop documents that met our need. I must say that these AI responses and documents got us to 70% of the way, not 100%. So, we are treating AI as a productivity enhancer and accelerator rather than something that will autonomously perform tasks for us.
Our next goal is to use AI to create AI applications, AI agents, and AI automation routines. We have started doing this by using AI for wireframe design (which AI does well) and AI for mockups that transform the schematic wireframe into a more visually detailed representation of the final product, incorporating elements like color, typography, and imagery. This is also going quite well to my surprise. The next big step for us is to translate these mockups into actual application screens and code that works behind the scenes to represent the original design and I will have more to share on that in a few weeks. We have been using AI to write python code, for example, for a few months now and that is getting better with each new model.
For meetings, both internal and external, Zoom AI companion and Google Meet call transcription and note taking AI tools are fantastic. With each day that goes by, I see their accuracy improving and this has been a huge time saver. We don't take notes manually anymore, and action items are clearly tracked and assigned at the end of each meeting.
Have you tried Google Notebook LM? This is a cool tool. Upload audio recordings, website links, documents and other data sources and it will create summaries, draft slides, and also generate a podcast for you to listen if you are too busy to read.
Have fun AI-xploring! :-)
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Arvind Rajan
Chief Executive Officer
Astute Business Solutions
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Message from the HEUG Marketplace:------------------------------
Find, Review, and Engage with Higher Education-focused solution providers, products, and services using the
HEUG Marketplace.
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-06-2025 11:05 AM
From: Alexandra Green
Subject: What's AI Quietly Powering Behind the Scenes?
We talk a lot about the big, flashy uses of AI - but what about the subtle, behind-the-scenes ways it's making your day a little easier?
Are you using it to prep reports faster?
Draft training materials?
Organize your inbox or fine-tune communications?
Even the smallest automations or efficiencies can add up. So let's compare notes - what's working for you? What's surprised you? What would you never go back to doing manually?
๐ Share your behind-the-scenes wins (or work-in-progress experiments) below!
#AI #tools
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Alexandra Green
Senior Community Manager
Higher Education User Group
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