The barriers to building technology are tumbling
When I first entered the technology scene quite a few decades ago, the landscape was quite different. It was a time when spreadsheets were solely about numbers and couldn't produce graphs. Spotting an opportunity, I created a business graphing application in BASIC whilst still in high school. It bridged a crucial gap, offering spreadsheet users a feature they were missing and craving. And it was my first commercially successful product.
In the recent years, it's required a lot more technical skills to have a product idea and get it into market - although creating a phone app and selling it through an app marketplace was a lot less daunting than some other routes.
Fast-forward to today, we're seeing a new trend that resonates with my early experiences. ChatGPT and Prompt Engineering are becoming go-to tools for individuals who may not have an extensive technical background but possess a good grasp of business needs. Teachers and AI enthusiasts are sharing custom prompts that help education & business professionals achieve tasks in much less time. It feels akin to the spreadsheet users I was aiding years ago.
Solve a business problem, and get it to market
The parallels between these two periods are striking. Back in the day, BASIC allowed me to create valuable commercial software without having to be a computer scientist. Now, ChatGPT and prompt engineering offer similar opportunities. They're essentially platforms that allow you to instruct a machine in plain language, turning your business acumen into operational reality.
This isn't just about easy access to technology; it's about understanding the user problem that needs solving. Whether it was identifying the missing graphing component in spreadsheets or recognising how ChatGPT could streamline an educator's workload, the real power lies in marrying technical capability with business savvy.
In many of the conversations talking with businesses hoping to creating new ventures offering generative AI services, based on ChatGPT and equivalents, there's an important issue that has to be addressed.
"Prompt Packs" are easy to produce, and hard to value
You can create great prompts that can help a user do something faster - responding to customer queries, creating training materials, creating business processes that are 80% faster than today. But a prompt isn't enough - you have to make the whole process easier. It has to be a service, not just a series of prompts to copy and paste. It has to hide the complexity and focus on the simplicity. And where possible walk the user through the process as quickly and helpfully as possible.
Imagine if all the forms we fill out for government and businesses, like insurers and banks, were instead smart bots - they go and read all the information they already have about you, and then ask you the few questions that fill in the gaps. Much better than filling out a 25 page form, where only one page contains new information.
Doing that has much more value than giving you a prompt pack to help fill out a form.
Building value with a solution
The other critical aspect is that a solution is much more valuable than a pack of power prompts. Valuable to the user, and valuable to your organisation. So many people are creating and giving away prompts that even if you've got the best prompt set in the world, it's going to have near-zero value. But wrap it into a solution, and then you're building value.