| AI GETS PERSONAL

ChatGPT and Bard are impersonal - for now. You will get better results with more information.

A wakeup call for organizations and information deletion.

How to get better results from AI

Every time you open Google Bard*, you start from scratch - it does not retain memory of who you are. Although you can recall previous conversations, what you said yesterday does not impact what Bard will tell you today.

In contrast, Google Search remembers a lot about you. Your Google profile, your previous queries, what you clicked on before and much more personalizes your result. In the extreme, that can lead to filter bubbles which reinforce biases. But mostly, it's why the search is so precise and why it is able to interpret an ambiguous keyword like "giants" as just the right sports team for you.

You can work around the AIs' short term memory via smart questions, or prompts. Compare these:

• Please* suggest 3 non-fiction books about generative AI.

• Imagine you are a person who works in IT consulting. You are familiar with ERP systems and cloud computing, but not a programmer. You are interested in how AI can impact society. Please suggest 3 non-fiction books about generative AI.

With more information, you can make it even better. Consider including a description of yourself ("Imagine you are a person" expanding to 800 words, like a biography) and what is generally important to you in life. Consider adding a list of books you have read. If you store these snippets (ideal candidates for your second brain!), you can mix and match them in the future.

In the future, accumulated knowledge will become more valuable

You own a personal goldmine, the key to truly personal AI: Your emails hold your writing style, and topics you care about - and who you deal with. Your Whatsapp backup is sitting there, idly. Your contact list and calendar hold your social graph. How you rate books, restaurants, wine, records can help you if you care about that. Your diary has your information about how you felt and what was important over time.

The next step for AI assistants will be to access your data directly. For most of us, that information sits in Gmail and Google Drive (both in our private and professional lives - separately, of course). As soon as you will be able to grant Bard or Duet AI access to Google Drive, you will get dramatically better results with much simpler queries.

But before we get there, two tips: Stop deleting content. And perhaps up your storage.

A trap for organizations

At work, past emails and documents are even more important. We are moving into a time where that may be a competitive advantage.

But storing data is more costly to organizations than to individuals: Small companies worry about storage cost (large companies enjoy infinite storage in Google Workspace) and large companies worry about having to produce emails and files for investigations. The more history is retained, the more expensive it becomes to sift through data. Just ask Rachel Zane, the royal paralegal from Suits.

Generative AI is making documents, emails and chats more valuable than structured data found in databases or specialist systems. Use cases already abound: Content generation. Training chatbots based on knowledge in Google Chat spaces. Finding tendencies. Security insights. Finding experts in the organization. But we have entered a time of emergent AI abilities. The AI models will be more capable in unpredictable ways and your data even more valuable. Some examples from the frontier: Universal translation. Onboarding people with summaries of what the organization is working on and what their predecessors did.

We don't know yet all the ways in which existing data will become more useful. We do know that short retention periods for chat, emails and documents will become a competitive disadvantage.

You are probably a better AI whisperer than me - but perhaps storing large snippets about yourself or an area you care about can save you time and yield precise results.  It is the first step into truly personalized AI.

Thank you for reading!

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