We've been using AI apps for a year - here's what we've learned

Over the past year, our team has actively tested and implemented various AI apps to improve our workflows. As pioneers in this rapidly evolving landscape, we wanted to share our key learnings to help you on your AI journey. Let’s dive deeper!

The launch of ChatGPT significantly increased public awareness and acceptance of AI.

Its ability to converse like a human and its user-friendly interface made this new technology accessible to a broader range of people. However, while ChatGPT is an impressive application, it is not the only AI app available. Since its launch on December 22, several more apps have emerged. If you only stick to ChatGPT, you are missing a lot! There are thousands of AI Apps out there that can greatly assist you in a variety of tasks, so make sure to explore as many as you possibly can.

Although ChatGPT had over 100 million users within two months, most people have only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Why? Because most are terrible when asking it to perform tasks, as they are unaware of how to prompt effectively.

Fine-tuning prompts and navigating failures require persistence and know-how that the average user has not yet developed. No matter what, to increase the value you get from ChatGPT, you have to be able to prompt effectively. To do so, check this video we recorded a while ago and use any AI Chatbot like a boss.

While AI can automate several tasks exceptionally well, its limitations around strategy, creativity, decision-making, empathy, ethics, and complex reasoning mean human skills will still dominate for the foreseeable future.

So, rather than fearing replacement, you must actively identify how AI can enhance your skills through amplification and augmentation. To do so, you must stay up-to-date with the current advancements and the new AI tools released daily. How? Well, follow people like me on Linkedin or pages like Educraft on YouTube, as they offer tons of knowledge for free. Adapting through continuous upskilling will be key to staying ahead of AI’s fast-moving frontier.

New shiny AI tools, promising the earth, appear daily. However, several of them are crappy. Then how to identify the ‘good ones’?

Experimentation can only tell you what apps are actually useful and beneficial. For example, there are several apps that I can no longer live without, such as Humata for asking questions related to my PDFs, and MaxAI as my AI copilot for communicating on social media. Therefore, my advice is to carefully assess an AI app’s unique value-add, accuracy, security, scalability, and integrability before committing precious resources. Don’t buy every AI app out there. Focus on quality over quantity.

Few sectors will be disrupted more by AI than education.

ChatGPT is already helping students expedite homework and providing customized explanations that improve outcomes. Over the next decade, we anticipate AI will transform how students learn and allow educators to focus less on content delivery and more on higher-order skills like critical thinking, creativity, and design thinking. Memorization will thankfully become obsolete while problem-based experiential learning thrives. Thus, your role as an educator is to help your students use ChatGPT ethically so that it won’t harm the skills they already possess.

ChatGPT and other AI Teaching Assistant apps can quickly generate full lesson plans, study guides, and problem sets. However, unless you prompt them perfectly, you will see that they have limitations in understanding learning goals and students’ specific requirements and needs.

Therefore, you should use ChatGPT to create initial drafts but manually review and modify the content before sharing it. This way, you can correct any factual errors and customize the material to focus on the desired skills. Collaborating with AI while taking advantage of each party’s strengths is crucial for increasing productivity without sacrificing quality or relevance.

Using AI tools can be really helpful for many tasks. However, over-reliance on AI can weaken our writing skills, analytical abilities, and creativity over time. Just because it’s easy to generate output with AI doesn’t mean we should skip questioning, improving, and coming up with our ideas. Leaders must think ahead and find a balance between being efficient and developing skills, especially as AI becomes more prevalent in essential workflows.

As the influence of AI systems grows exponentially, ethical considerations around data privacy, accountability, transparency, bias mitigation and more will become increasingly crucial. Thus, it is necessary for a (global) regulatory framework for the responsible use of AI to be defined. Until this framework is established, there are several guides you can use to help you and your students use AI responsibly and ethically.