Summer Crenshaw

Building your portfolio using volunteer services is a great way to build your network, hone your skills and create case studies for your AI work. Lean into areas of passion or areas where you want to become a leader. This may mean working on projects that you normally don't work on that will give valuable diversity in your experience.

One of the best ways to showcase the power of AI, is to first look at where time is spent. I had a client that had a large sales team. It would take hours of the sales person's time to build and send proposals after a sales call was ran. I reviewed their process and was able to use operationalize all step by step using make.com to fully automate the production of their proposals. This saved hundreds of man-hours for each rep per year, and allowed them to execute proposals quickly (securing deals quickly). The area that the client was most excited about, besides the time that was saved along with the velocity increase in the pipeline, they loved that the human was still in the loop because it was set to allow the rep to push the final docs.

BI has long been a critical job with most enterprise organizations. AI has empowered more access to BI roles, opening the opportunity up to those that may not have had access to the role or trained in a traditional way. Roles that highlight analytics, and even business operations will include BI, so this field will be ever evolving and expand well beyond the traditional scope.

Ethical AI means having a human-centered mentality. Designing and deploying any AI tool that discounts the ethical considerations, specifically the longer tail human-impact could lead to catastrophic issues for humanity. In an era where there is still little regulations, we must self-regulate and come from a place of bettering humanity. We can use models to validate or predict human impact and can even use synthetic personas to understand how our technology will affect humanity as a base process by reviewing what we produce from an ethical lens.

While reading from blogs/outlets are great, the space is moving too quickly. The best thing to do is curate your own personal newsletter so that you can collect the type of content you want to gain expertise in. Using platforms like Feedly or RSS.app can help you create a feed. You could use Zapier or make.com to then create an automated daily email to you to keep you up to date on all.

My favorite thing to do is first outline the industries or subject areas you have curiosity about. Then outline a list of problems you think stakeholders in that area may face, and ways that you could solve the problem. From there I would like to ask for advice to confirm the problem is truly an issue that needs to be solved, and then offer to work with the person to solve that challenge for them in exchange for referral or feedback. If you can solve this for one person/company, you can rinse/repeat with many others. It is a win/win. You get the experience and the person you are working with gets valuable consulting.