The AI Advantage: Adelynne Chao

Hey there,

Every Sunday, a stellar guest from the world of product shares the AI-powered tactics and prompts they use to supercharge their workflow.

Time to grab a coffee and get inspired with practical AI use cases in the context of day-to-day work of inspirational pioneers - the people shaping the impact of generative AI on how we discover and build products.

This week’s guest is Adelynne Chao.

Adelynne is the founder of Untold Insights, a research and strategy consultancy that helps product and marketing teams accelerate their initiatives using deep customer insight and cutting-edge AI.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adelynnechao/

What’s your most used AI tool?

By far the most used is OpenAI.

Give us a walk-through of typical use cases you have for working with OpenAI.

#1 AI as an 'imagination printer'

At a conference I attended last year I heard someone describe generative AI tools as an 'imagination printer' and I really can't think of a better way of putting it. At Untold we work with clients on accelerating their initiatives through a combination of research, discovery and design. AI has become a huge part of enhancing the solutions we offer and enhancing client outcomes.

#2 AI is like the world's largest brain

Treat AI like it's the world's largest brain. With the ability to handle a large cognitive load (better than we can), it has the power to draw on a vast knowledge base to conduct thought exercises that throw teams out of their day to day thinking and inspire their creativity. If you're looking to get out of your own head, there are some compelling AI prompts that can really help you do this effectively.

#3 AI and customer-led thinking

One thing we've discovered is that AI has the incredible ability to think in terms of the customer. This is something that many of us struggle to do, because our knowledge is skewed and biased by our knowledge of a company's current product line or technical capability. AI on the other hand, can think only in terms of customer challenges and is therefore not limited by existing capability which means it can push us further in our ideas.

#4 AI app ideation example

Today we wanted to share one use case for AI that can help you experiment. We suggest giving ChatGPT a context (i.e. business challenge) and a clear customer behavioural trend and running it through a mini ideation session to develop a new app idea.

In the example we've shown we provided the context of creating a new personal financial management app in a crowded space, focusing on the emerging trend of consumers seeking 'financial independence / financial freedom'. (Please note that these particular examples were output following a longer prompting exercise but are illustrative.)

As you can see - AI was able to harness multiple streams of information (context, challenge, customer needs and trends) and output a well formulated idea on what an app seeking to solve this particular customer challenge might look like.

Following this we were able to dive deeper asking it for feature sets, suggested MVP, roadmap, algorithmic suggestions, campaign ideas and landing page copy.

#5 Conclusion

At Untold our philosophy with AI centers around its ideation powers. Those that invest in learning and experimenting with its capabilities will be far ahead in terms of accelerating and enhancing their own processes and ideas.

Learning how to use AI as a supportive tool, can 10x your productivity and boost the creativity of your teams.

Are there any other generative AI tools you use?

Image generation tools: DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion

In certain cases it is possible to use image generation tools to take product or marketing ideation a step further. To bring visual concepts to life. For example, we got AI to imagine a collaboration between Tesla and North Face resulting in a range of product ideas such as a Tesla x North Face branded solar-powered lamp and camping gear.

Again - these are far from final product concepts but its ability to instantly visualise complex ideas quickly can really change the game for creative teams.

Any tips for others who work in tech who want to improve their AI-powered productivity?

I've seen a vast and drastic difference in the quality of AI's outputs depending on the quality of the prompt, instructions and context provided. It is very much garbage in, garbage out.

AI is a tool - a malleable brain space that you can tune to your needs. So my one tip would be to invest time into learning and experimenting with AI thought exercises, prompts and instructions so that you can get the most out of the tool in the moments that really matter.

Working on anything else AI-related?

Untold are currently developing SegmentAI (coming soon) which is our AI-powered ideation tool that allows you to train your own AI customer segments so you can gather insights, test messaging and ideate with them.

It's the next step on from ChatGPT in terms of dedicated user-friendly tools that help organisations utilise the power of AI to elevate their work. So watch this space!

That’s all for today’s issue folks!

Thanks again for being here. Keep an eye out for tomorrow’s issue. Every Monday get a beyond-the-hype read on the generative AI news, events and innovation that really matter for product people.