Nov 20, 2023 2:29 PM
Replying to Keith Novak
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Demonstrating and promoting the capabilities of AI can be as simple as unlocking features everyone already has but few use.
This year I scored a big win using some data analytics functions accessible to anyone with Office. Excel has some amazing capabilities already built in without even accessing add-in functions. You just need to know how to ask the questions.
A co-worker showed me how to use a macro that would access the data tables in a database rather than navigating through multiple menus to gather the data manually. I used some basic statistics functions that I can't remember how to calculate, but that auto-fill recognizes after typing in 3 letters. A google search and some YouTube videos later and I could graph the results. Most of it showed nothing but one number stood out and it happened to be very important.
What I did was remarkably simple using AI functions we take for granted but hadn't tried. It earned me a recognition award for what really amounted to finding a cool hack in a video game. The finding itself involved some luck, but demonstrated why we should use the capability more. By advertising how we solved a big problem using the data, it also expanded my professional network to people who are real data scientists with much more powerful tools than Excel and know how to ask the smart questions.
Play with the tools, find the cool hack, and then most importantly show others how accessible that capability really is.