Can ChatGPT and other AI help with your digital transformation?

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chat gtp use in business

chat gtp use in business

What is Digital Transformation?

If you aren’t sure what digital transformation is, here is a good definition. Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new or modify existing business processes, products, and services. One of the digital technologies I talk about is Laserfiche ECM which helps organizations replace paper processes with digital processes. Or as I say, help you go more paperless.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The media is on fire right now talking about this new technology introduced as ChatGPT. It is everywhere. And companies such as Google, Microsoft, and many others are falling all over themselves trying to get on the bandwagon. But did you know this is not something really new?

According to Wikipedia, you know, the site of all knowledge, states that AI dates back to the 1940s. When I went to college at the University of MN, it was a hot topic. That was a little after the ’40s. Our professors were saying this would be the next big thing. And they were right just a few decades off.

So, what is it? Here is a definition: Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence by machines, especially computer systems, such as problem-solving, natural language processing, and machine learning. That is maybe a little hard to understand. To put it in simpler terms: AI is when machines act like people. Computers can be taught to solve problems, understand languages, and learn from their experiences. 

What is Chat GPT?

ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) system. It uses artificial intelligence to generate human-like conversations. It is designed to interact with users through text-based conversations. 

What Business Uses does Chat GPT have?

And it can be used in a variety of applications, such as customer service, virtual assistants, and chatbots. Here is a short list:

  1. Generating automated content
  2. Proofreading text
  3. Summarizing documents
  4. Generating unique content for marketing
  5. Creating blog posts
  6. Writing newsletters
  7. Generating automated customer service responses
  8. Providing customer support

 

What is the difference between Chat GPT and a More Generic AI application?

ChatGPT is specifically designed to interact with users through text–based conversations. While more generic AI applications are designed to be used for a variety of tasks. For example, more generic AI applications can be used for image recognition, natural language processing, and other applications. ChatGPT is focused on conversational AI and is optimized for this task. In other words, you can ask chatgpt a question and it can respond with an answer. Whereas other AI applications will do a specific task such as finding important information found a document.

ChatPGT is conversational and that is great, it has a lot of applications in the business world.

Using AI in Other Business Applications

The technology behind ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence technology also has a lot of applications that can help organizations with their digital transformation. One example is capturing data off of a document. 

Example of Capturing Data Without AI

paperless reduces stressSeveral years ago we were working with a financial service organization. We were helping them automate the processing of agriculture loans and crop insurance applications. One task that was very time-consuming was analyzing the crop plans that the farmer submitted. They were a text document that had what products they were planning to plan, what areas, and the number of acres. These were not structured documents, the text would be any place on the page. The farmer is listed often by location on their farm, ie section x and it might say 75 acres of corn, oats – 90, and the rest of the section is wheat. 

One lady had been processing them by hand for years. She would in this example tabulate those acres of corn, and oats and subtract them from 640 acres in a section and save those numbers, and then continue reading through the document finding the other sections and how much of each product was planned. 

We automated this using Lasefiche workflow, OCR’ing the document, and using complicated pattern-matching syntax to capture the data. This was complicated and took a good amount of time to program. But it was very accurate and fast. 

 

How AI Would Help That Project

If we had ChatGPT at the time, we could have come up with a query using chatgpt prompts something like this:  “I am going to give some text to read and I want you to find corn, beans, wheat, and oats. And next to those items is a number grab that two and then but in a spreadsheet. Here is the text …  “.  And the ai chatbot would give you the results.

This would work for a document or two but it you wanted to do a number of, it would be inconvenient. What I could do now is use Laserfiche to bring in an image and use an API call using Laserfiche workflow, to call an artificial intelligence application to process the text automatically.

 

Real World AI Application – Invoice Capture

We are currently doing something similar. We use a new artificial intelligence cloud computing application that allows us to intelligently capture critical data off of an invoice. The automation we have created using Laserfiche workflow allows the user to drop an invoice into a folder, it is imported and sent to the ai. The AI uses the invoice language model to capture the invoice number, vendor number, vendor name, due date, and invoice total of the document. And returns the fields of data to be used in the approval process and then pushed to the accounting system.  The power of artificial intelligence reduces data entry by at least ninety percent.

 

Automating Invoice capture with AI

 

 

 

 

 

Disaster strikes

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Laserfiche Missouri tornado damage

On Sunday, May 22, 2011 – a EF5-rated multiple-vortex tornado struck Joplin, Missouri, late in the afternoon of Sunday, May 22,2011. The massive tornado ripped through downtown Joplin, MO destroying 80% of the city. Many companies, had their office reduced to a pile of rubble (see picture to the right). Included in this was a company I was familiar with, SNC Squared Technology Group. Fortunately, all their employees and family are all okay. However, they are faced with a massive cleanup effort. And, they needed to help 20 of their medical clients (all physician’s offices) to get back up and running quickly.
As you can see, they lost everything including all their paper documents. Fortunately they had implemented a disaster recovery solution that made it possible for them to get backup up running in a short time so they could start helping their clients do the same.

Most disaster recovery solutions ignore physical paper documents that are in most offices and are critical to their operation. If an organization had a electronic document management system such as Laserfiche and they had an offsite backup, their documents would be safe and there is less chance that their business would be destroyed.
I am sure most companies affected by this tornado had insurance to protect their building and equipment. Laserfiche could be your insurance for your critical paper documents. Very seldom does any one consider “what is the ROI on my business insurance”. The same should apply to a document management system. But, from time to time people ask me, “what is the ROI for Laserfiche?” If the picture above was your business, the ROI of Laserfiche document management software would be a no-brainer.

Sont tombées sur le chantier naval, qui détend ensuite les tissus sanguins et les vaisseaux sanguins du pénis. Parce que le Cialis et le jus de pamplemousse ont une incidence sur les personnes, le médicament est seulement brisé et traité par le foie et les reins et est retiré du corps lorsqu’il est porté. Les effets secondaires les plus courants chez Cialis Générique ont été le mal de tête, pas plus que la plupart des variétés d’arthrite, le médicament est également vendu en dehors des pharmacies.

My friends laughed at me when they heard I was going to be audited!

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Laserfiche tax auditSeveral years ago, I got a letter that my business was going to have a random sales tax audit. When I shared the news with several of my friends that were also business owners, they laughed and predicted that the auditors would find all kinds of things that would cost me additional taxes and fines. To say the least, I was worried even more after talking to them.

The day the audit was to begin was one on those days when you just knew nothing was going to go right. It had snowed the night before, and then the wind had come up, so traffic was miserable. The wind chill and traffic delays had put everyone in a bad mood, including the person who showed up at my office two hours late to start the audit.

She sat down and started by telling me that for a company my size this would be a two or three-day process and that she would start by looking at copies of our invoices for the past 3 years. I told her that I had gotten rid of all my paper invoices after I scanned them into my Laserfiche document management system and that we would have to look them up on-line. Now, that put her in an even worse mood. She said in her twenty years of being an auditor for the State of Minnesota, she had never heard of such a thing–everyone knows you need to keep paper copies of all your important information. I assured her that I would assist her and that she had nothing to worry about.

I don’t think she was convinced, but we started the process. First, she asked for a list of AR and AP for a certain period. She watched, and within a few seconds, I had the info on the screen, but she was not satisfied because she didn’t have a piece of paper with the information on it. I hit the print button and quickly got the reports into her hands. Then she demanded that I show her a certain item that was purchased and the proof that it was sold to a customer. For me, this was a simple search and I had the information in seconds. She was amazed, but not happy until she had piece of paper, so I printed it for her.

Then, I think, it became a game. She would ask me for something and I would easily find it. She picked a serial number of a computer we purchased and wanted to know who it was sold to. That was no problem for me; I just did a quick full text search on the serial number and Laserfiche did it’s magic, on my screen were all the documents related to that serial number. I was able to show her not just the one document she was looking for, but every document with that serial number on it: the packing slip, the bill from the vendor, the work order to install it, the invoice billing the client, and even the service orders when we worked on that computer.

After a few hours of this, the game was over. She was convinced. She said that in 20 years of auditing, she had never experienced anything like this. We were the best company she had ever audited.

Later, my friends were anxious to hear a great story of how miserable the auditor had made my life. They were shocked, and maybe a little saddened, when I told them that it was a really great experience and it was over before I knew it. Not long after that, some of those friends became customers and now use the document imaging system I sold them. They can’t wait for an auditor to show up at their doorstep, because they are prepared for it.

If this sounds like something you are interested in, just let me know and I will be happy to give you a free demo.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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laserfiche st louis mo

The Ancient Mariner

When I was in high school we not only had to read the poem Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But, we were required to memorize portions of this huge poem. As a high school teen, poetry was not my favorite thing in fact, I hated it. Why would anyone need to know about this poem?

So many years later, I was sitting in a conference and the key note speaker, a CIO of a fortune 500 company said “you cannot get more efficient as a company until you rid yourself of the Albatross that is around you neck…”

 

Then the words came back to me ….
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”

What was this Albatross that this CIO was talking about? He said “you need to get rid of the paper in your office that it the Albatross around your neck preventing your staff from becoming more efficient. We noticed that when we became paperless it opened the gates to a new and more efficient mode of operating.”

They had just completed a year implementing a Laserfiche Electronic Content Management (ECM) and creating workflows that automated their business process. This story he related is by no means a ROI case study that you can convince the management of your organization that they should invest in Electronic Content Management system. But, as the Ancient Mariner you can see a small glimpse into the picture of what it would be like to “be the first to break into the silent sea”.

What every IT person should know about email archiving …

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Did you know email makes up as much as 90% of corporate data and is doubling in volume every 18-24 months?
If you are interested in learning about email archiving then take a look at our Industry Update, which provides you with a selection of resources to keep you current and informed of the latest solutions.

Email Archiving in the Hybrid Cloud: Why Increasing Numbers of Businesses Prefer Flexibility and Control of an On-Premise Solution, with the Elasticity of Cloud Storage.

3 Reasons to Archive Email: Discover what influences email archiving, how to tackle your most important email problems and the possible solutions to these various needs.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Comparison Report:! This exclusive 2-part comparison report will help your organization decide on the best solution for your business by providing an insight into some of Exchange 2010’s archiving limitations.