As the prominence and rapid advancements of AI in our world grows, so does the concern from much of the global workforce. How many times have you heard, “AI is going to replace all of us one day!” While AI may take the form of an ever-present coworker, it will be alongside us human folk. In fact, AI really, really needs us.

For anyone that is in a job that requires a high level of communication or writing skills, it’s understandable that there is concern that AI may take over those tasks. After all, AI is already writing a student’s term paper, composing difficult emails to give them a softer touch, and double checking our reports before we hand them in to the boss. But rather than thinking AI is lurking in the shadows waiting to steal our jobs, it could be your team’s new best friend. It’s all about how you train it.

AI needs humans

Let’s be real here, AI can actually be really dumb. You can craft prompts that give you helpful and somewhat consistent responses, but these can often be generic and not very applicable for business processes. For this, your AI needs a brain, and you choose the brain you want to give it. This is essentially a pre-defined bucket of knowledge the AI references so that it is designed to only provide answers within a specific context.

When I look at it from the perspective of a consultant, I see opportunity for greater efficiencies by bringing AI into the team dynamic. Imagine being able to service and deliver to clients faster without having to onboard additional billable resources. Faster delivery saves the client money and keeps them coming back for more. Meanwhile, your valuable billable resources can handle a higher capacity of projects.

More projects mean more revenue, and you don’t even have to expand your current team! Client win. Staffing win. Revenue win. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. So how is this accomplished?

Creating customized AI agents

If you have a team dedicated to continuously learning and exploring the latest innovations in AI, they can help tailor AI applications to a team’s specific needs. This isn’t going out to the unsecured world-wide-web and asking Chat GPT or Gemini to write a blog article about AI for you. Rather this is a customized and shielded tool that is molded into an SME that seamlessly fits in with your team. These tools are agents.

By leveraging an AI application, such as Copilot that can hook into your organizational Microsoft graph (the API that references data from applications such as Outlook, Teams and SharePoint), you can create this agent completely behind the barriers you set up. That means it will only reference material within your organization for knowledge that you give it access to. Additionally, the agent will only be available to members of your organization or even secured groups within the organization.

You can customize agents to follow a specific methodology used by your team to tailor the responses to fit a specific structure or outcome. As a consultant, writing requirements documentation can sometimes be a daunting task. You write it, then re-write it, then talk to the client and re-write it three more times. In all those revisions, you really need a fresh set of eyes to help catch those little things that start getting overlooked like typos, a repeated line or two, a missing user story reference, etc.

“Hello, this is your Analyst Agent, how can I assist you today?”

Imagine simply handing those requirements over to your customized agent without the need for any instructions or prompts. The knowledge is already built in to do a very specific job, your requirements outline is the prompt for your agent to get to work.

In mere seconds you have suggestions on how to improve your requirements and those missed typos, repetitions, or verbiage continuity issues are picked up. Maybe it has also provided a level of effort estimation you can share with your PM and Developers. How about QA test scenarios based on requirements details to help your testing team get a head start. You just went from being a day behind to being a week ahead, all because of your new 24/7 on-call agent.

A future of collaboration

There is no reason to be afraid that AI will fully replace us, our way of working will simply adjust. Think about way back when the typewriter was getting replaced by computers. The world adjusted then, and we can do it again. Before long, we may forget what it was like before this technology existed. In the meantime, embrace the idea of agents that can allow you to do more in less time. After all, cloning yourself still is not an option.

Please note, this article was completely generated by real life human Jeanne Marie Shuffler, Senior Business Analyst at Thinkmax, a Talan company, who also still owns a typewriter.

Jeanne Marie leverages her more than ten years of experience working in, and doing implementations on, the Optimizely CMS and Commerce applications. She brings extensive industry knowledge for B2B, retail distribution, financial institutions, and non-profit in her portfolio of work.