What AI can do for your business

The transcription discusses the importance of AI in businesses, particularly in the Gippsland region. The host, Melanie Cahani interviews Jules Blundell and Matteo about TAFE Gippsland's new workshops on Accelerating AI for Business. Jules emphasizes the growing gap in AI adoption between businesses and the need for practical training opportunities. Matteo explains that AI tools like ChatGPT and Chord are like smart assistants that can understand and communicate in natural language. They discuss the benefits and challenges of AI adoption, including concerns about data security and job displacement. The workshops aim to help small business owners in Gippsland leverage AI confidently. Get ready for the insider's guide to local business stories. Welcome to the business huddle, your weekly passport into Gippsland's most inspiring businesses. Real conversations, real challenges, real local legends. Let's look at the game plan and get started. Strap yourself in, we're ready to go. And welcome back to the business huddle. I'm your host Melanie Cahani. Thank you for joining me today. Did you know that the business huddle is now on demand? Simply head over to the Gippsland FM website, check the program guide, scroll down to the business huddle and you can view all of our previous episodes there. And that's all thanks to Energy Australia. If you're new to the show, business huddle is where we huddle up every week to tackle the messy, exciting and ever-changing world of business. We dive into the trends that matter, the hurdles we're all facing and get real insights from our guests. So today on the huddle we're diving deep into a topic that I'll be honest I'm genuinely excited about. I'm excited about a lot of my topics that I talk about but it's artificial intelligence or AI. It's everywhere right now and if you're a business owner you've probably heard it mentioned at a networking event or read about it in a headline or maybe you've even tried it yourself and thought what am I actually supposed to do with this? So here's what I know from working with businesses every day. The gap between businesses that aren't using AI confidently and those who haven't started yet is growing fast and for regional businesses especially that gap really matters. So today I've got two brilliant guests from TAFE Gippsland joining me to cut through the noise. Jules Blundell is TAFE Gippsland's General Manager of Innovation and Product Strategy. She's thinking about the big picture of how digital capability shapes the future of this region and its workforce and Matt Castiello is the expert behind TAFE's brand new workshops Accelerating AI for Your Business, a hands-on practical session, I think there's two, designed specifically for Gippsland business owners who want to start using AI tools confidently without needing a tech background. Together they're going to help us answer the questions I hear most often. Where do I even start? What tools are actually useful and what happens to the businesses that don't get on board? So whether you're already experimenting with AI or you've been putting it in the too hard basket this one is for you. Stick around it's going to be a great conversation coming up after this. Jules and Matteo, welcome to The Huddle I'm genuinely excited to have you both here and talking about this topic Jules, TAFE Gippsland isn't just a training provider You're also deeply invested I guess in the economic future of this region What was it that made you say we need to be running a program specifically on AI for business and why now? Great question Melanie, thanks for having us on We're hearing the same thing from businesses across the region which is they're time poor, margins are tight They know that AI is important but they're not really quite sure where to start We also know that nationally AI adoption is growing but the regional areas are lagging behind due to limited practical training opportunities that are relevant and meaningful to their business So AI is growing so fast, it's gone from experimental to sort of everyday and we want to be able to basically help the small businesses in the Gippsland region to get confident with using AI in their businesses and start to sort of leverage some of the major benefits that it can bring Yeah, it's definitely needed I guess in this region and I think most people's understanding of AI is just ask ChatGPT and even now when you Google something there's your AI answer and that might be the length that's where it stops for some people So I think especially for businesses it's important what you guys are doing to sort of bring us up to speed with the rest of the nation or the state and I feel like rural sort of gets left behind a little bit sometimes but from your vantage point in innovation, product strategy what are you actually seeing on the ground in Gippsland? Are local businesses engaging with it yet or is there still a lot of that hesitation around it? Yeah, we're seeing a real mix actually A small group of businesses are experimenting confidently with it and moving forward and larger groups are dabbling and they're sort of a big middle which is where they're curious but quite hesitant in getting started but most of the engagement that we're seeing so far is in lower risk areas like drafting emails, basic social media or summarising documents rather than fully rethinking processes and how it can bring impact to their business So the hesitation is less about the technology It's more about the confidence that we're seeing People are worried about getting it wrong or about the data and compliance challenges there So we're looking to help bring the confidence and alleviate any of those worries away from them with this training Do you think people are thinking as well they're scared of losing their job? Yeah, it's really interesting I've talked to my staff about this as well and I said it's not about losing your job I said it's about changing what you do and how you do it So there is always the human in the loop Even as good as the AI tools are coming in all the work that we're doing we cannot possibly not have the human in the loop So for me with my staff it's very much about training them up on AI and teaching them how to use the tools that are available in a really smart, efficient way but getting maximum benefit from it Definitely, and I think even training staff I feel like it used to be a bit of a dirty little secret a few years ago Yes, I wrote that when I really didn't But now I think it's really encouraging to see that there's employers out there that are like, okay, use it, but maybe use it responsibly within the business and I think we'll get into some of this a little bit later Matteo, I want to bring you in here Let's get the practical side of things When a Gippsland small business owner hears AI what should they actually be picturing and what are the tools we're really talking about here? Thanks Melanie So I think there's always that level of confusion around AI because it's such a loaded term that's used so frequently and that's largely because it's actually a general purpose technology so it's actually more akin to something like energy or electricity as it is a tool specifically and I think that's why there is a lot of ambiguity around what the technology actually does However, for the sake of the workshops that are coming up we really want to be using these tools like Chachapiti, Chord or Copilot which are really like smart assistants The beautiful thing about AI or generative AI specifically is that it understands our language and it can also communicate in our language So that's a very novel thing for technology at least and really what potential participants should be thinking of is interacting with this digital assistant which is able to understand you communicating to it in natural language, so English and then responding back to you in English but also with a bunch of really useful features around analyzing data, generating images, videos to Jules' point, thinking about how to reimagine workflows So to make it practical we're really talking about a digital assistant that you can talk to and it will also respond back to you in a relatively natural way I think that's a good starting point I guess for businesses as well especially some who haven't tried it just starting with something and having it respond I know you can teach tools like Chord to mimic you and to be honest, like I said before I feel like sometimes it does a better job than what I could actually do But yeah, maybe just sort of getting people started so just using those basic tools for conversation type scenarios Is there a risk I guess of if you're using it for data and maybe companies have to think about this what you're actually sharing with these tools like uploading sensitive spreadsheets maybe Where does that go to? Does it just head out there into the world of the internet and AI and can other people draw on that? It seems a little bit scary in that sense It's a great question Really for anyone that has a paid subscription to any of these tools out of the box you can toggle on and off whether you want your data to be used to retrain the models and obviously the recommendation is that you toggle that thing off so that you know that your data is not being used to retrain the models and then obviously it could be surfaced for use of labor down the track and if you do that, what you're really using is a tool that's very similar to email or word It's going to be stored online It's likely to be stored in a data center within Australia so it's really as safe as using any other online tool that you would be using today Yeah, good I think even for a bigger organization like TAFE, Jules do you guys have parameters around what sort of data you're allowed to put into your AI? Yes, we do have that Obviously being government, they're very conscious about those things but I think they're really open-minded and open to exploring what's the best option for our organization and the needs So we're in the process of rolling out co-pilot licenses at the moment We've got a technology working group that is experimenting and working with that tool and learning on that tool at the moment and then once we've got the confidence and the business has the confidence and knows that it's being used by the staff the big thing in that one is staff training so it's just allowing them to know what they can and can't do as well and we're building agents as well to help put some guardrails around say curriculum development or assessment writing and things like that So we're definitely doing what we're going to be recommending to businesses Start small and just grow and add and it's a bit like a Lego, you just keep on building on it And Matteo, Jules just mentioned agents there Can you give our listeners a bit of an idea about what an AI agent is please? Well it's another one of those loaded terms that has many, many definitions Back in the days when AI or chat GPT was just getting started the differentiation between just chatting with these live language models like you would in chat GPT compared to an actual agent was the degree of autonomy that the agent had to do its work So you could think if you're chatting with chat GPT you're getting a response back, you're in control of how you dictate the conversation the direction of the conversation and the responses that you get Whereas when you create an agent what you're giving it is an end goal so you're giving it an objective and then you're giving it a set of parameters that it's able to work within So let's say hey I want you to give me a deep dive analysis of my financials for the past quarter You would then give it access to the right tools so maybe you give it access to a spreadsheet maybe you give it access to some records of industry benchmarks for the business and industry that you're in and then you just let it go and kind of run its course and come back to you with whatever it thinks the answer is and what that really comes back to is instead of you dictating every single response from the model like you would a chat you're actually giving it an objective and a set of parameters and letting it almost have a degree of autonomy in how it achieves that end objective Now like I said that term is becoming more and more loaded and there are many definitions for it A lot of these out of the box tools like chat GPT, Claude and Copilot allow you to create these agents out of the box and they all follow that similar pattern of okay give me a clear set of instructions for a specific task give me access to the right information and data and then tell me what my end objective is and that allows you to have a kind of degree of automation for a very specific task within your business Would a small business use an agent or can they build an agent? Is that what you do? Do you build it? Correct. Yeah, there's kind of varying degrees of complexity but as a business owner you almost could think of it as configuring your agent so you can use the out of the box tools that come with chat GPT and they provide a relatively easy way and interface of being able to build out these let's call them configurable agents within those applications So maybe if a staff is thinking I don't know how to do this and the company or the business has an agent could they just type it in there like they would normally say on a chat GPT without heading it out there to the world and then that agent knows the business so it can actually give you an answer? Correct. So once businesses start to explore and get hands on with the technology it will get them immediate, call it like marginal productivity improvements within the business Big words The next steps after that are more around okay, how do I think about actually giving a clear set of instructions to this technology so that it can go and kind of understand my way of working out of the box So most of the work that we do at Insurgence is sitting down with business teams usually for larger enterprises and actually sitting down and helping them document how they do this work from start to finish and that's kind of the next evolution where to your point you're sitting down and almost documenting instructions or an onboarding manual for this agent and then it's helping you to complete a specific task Now to Jules' point it won't do it all but it does get rid of a lot of that drudge and manual work that lives kind of in the middle of the task like you want a human to be planning and doing the creative pieces and you want a human to be reviewing it to make sure that it's accurate but all of that stuff in the middle that's highly repetitive that's the sort of thing that you want to try and offload towards these agents Yeah definitely One of the examples that we've got that we're working with Mateo on is around compliance So working with AFCA and TAFE we have a lot of compliance and so we're working on building an agent that can help us like put the parameters in on what we want it to pick up and then it can help us make sure that our documents are compliant and that is going to save us a lot of time once we get it up and running just one simple task which is compliance and it'll help us do that and it's worth its weight in gold It's almost a rude word for some organisations it's like oh more compliance Yes exactly but we're hopefully using AI to credibly to reduce that angst and go compliance yes Let's do it And there's still that human interaction I think which is the important part so AI could be good in that middle space there but the human is still running the show and I think a lot of people have a really big misconception around that What's the biggest misconception you come across when you start working with business owners on this sort of stuff and what do people actually get wrong when they're trialling AI in their business? Well I think you hit the nail on the head there Melanie in that people do seem to think that it replaces entire roles or jobs when in reality AI is there to help complete tasks within a process so if you think of a single job often completes many processes underneath it and then within that process are many tasks and you really want to think about AI supporting you at a task level at the starting point and what that means is that AI becomes an accelerant of your existing capability as an individual so it doesn't replace what you do it actually allows you to have more scale in different aspects of your role Yeah that's important You're listening to the Business Huddle on Gippsland FM and we've been talking, well we are talking to Jules Blundell from Taste Gippsland and Mateo Castiello I think I said that right, from Insurgence So guys you're running a hands on workshop which means that people are actually sitting down and using these tools I'm thinking What tends to happen in that room? Is there a moment when you see the pennies drop to somebody? There is. I think for most small businesses including myself probably on a weekly basis I'll try new paths with AI or tools, AI tools and it's really amazing what the technology can do and I have those moments I used to probably have them on a monthly basis and now I think I'm having them on a weekly basis because the technology is moving so quickly and it's very satisfying seeing small business owners go through that same series of aha moments throughout their journey with AI because it really is, for someone who has never used the technology to be able to talk to this thing like you would a colleague or a friend and for it to just intuitively almost understand you and be able to respond back as a seemingly very intelligent entity it's really fascinating and those moments of fascination only compound over time the more that you use the technology and unlock these new capabilities so I'm really keen to see what business owners come up with on the day when they're using this, like I said this general purpose technology that does have almost limitless applications So yeah, do you want to give us a bit of an idea so about the workshops I'll leave the details on the website but what's actually happening here so you're bringing a small business workshop to Gippsland yay, into Morwell what can people expect and where are they signing up? So we're going to be going really from start to finish so starting with the basics of AI really from the ground up on what are the most important things that you need to know about the technology using it responsibly and effectively and then we're going to get very practical by going to each typical area of the business and trying to get participants to leverage AI within that area of the business so we'll go through marketing and communications to finance and all through these areas and try to have practical use cases that people are using the technology for Yeah and Jules, why I mean you've obviously engaged with Matteo on this what need did you see I guess in this market and why bring it into the Valley and is there nothing else like it here or are we not thinking about that? I think it's a great initiative by the way Thank you We did do some background research and tried to see what was available for businesses in the area and it's an interesting one because there's a hundred AI training courses and there's free ones everywhere but I guess our learning philosophy is that you kind of need to get hands in and practice and do it there and as Matteo said use cases that are relevant to you as opposed to being a passive learner and so that's where we felt that this was going to be different in the fact that we were really going to get that hands on element and we want to talk to the businesses that come along as well and find out what they need in the future as well does this suit them would they like more of this or if not what do they need so that we can continue to do that because there's a huge economic impact to the Gippsland area if we can support businesses to embrace these tools that are available to them Definitely and not get left behind I guess because as I said before it's moving so quickly it's like a clothesline that used to swing around you've got to hang on otherwise it's just going to take off Matteo the workshop description mentions using AI safely and responsibility and I think that's a pretty important qualifier here what risks or mistakes do you see people make when they're first sort of jumping into this maybe even in the workshop or when they're first starting to implement AI in their business Thanks Mel I think we've touched on a couple of the things that are most important I think there are very tactical things that any business can do like staying data aware and when I say data aware what we really mean is having the right practices to make sure that your data is protected and then having a risk-based approach around which data you share with these models and which data you don't and that's often very specific to the business and the industry that you're in and then as Jewel said if you're in public sector the legislation that kind of underpins how you should be using the technology and dealing with data as well and then I think the other risk is it's less around it's less around security and more around humans making sure that they understand that they are the expert in their realm so AI is it's an accelerant of what you already do like I mentioned it earlier so it's not something that replaces you and it's not something that just because you give it a question and it gives you something that sounds half right you can blindly shoot it off or publish it from that point onwards it is something that almost like you're treating it like a smart new intern within your organisation it's something that you need to be on top of, review continue to train and treat it like it is like I said this smart new intern that's entering your business which means that you always double check what it does and you acknowledge that you're the expert you're the person who needs to make sure that you're reviewing that information before it gets sent to its final destination I think that's a really important thing to note there so thank you we are going to quickly take a break for the news you're listening to Business Huddle on Gippsland FM with my guest Jules Blundell from Chase Gippsland and Matteo Castiello from Insurgence and we're talking all things AI and business but we will be right back and welcome back to the Business Huddle on Gippsland FM 104.7 your community connection we are talking today to Jules Blundell from Chase Gippsland and Matteo Castiello from Insurgence we're talking all things AI and business and thanks for joining me guys, I feel like we've sort of covered a lot before the news there what I really want to sort of get down to Jules, Chase is thinking about this at a systems level workforce, industry, community, how do you see digital capability and AI literacy really fitting into the longer term picture for regional economic resilience yeah, it's such an important question and it's something that there's a lot of research out there now that supports that without digital literacy and AI it's the people are going to be getting left behind and it's now really a core core resilience skill for businesses to ensure that they I hate to say it but keeping up with the trends, keeping up with the technology keeping up with the learning that goes on with it because it's going to be the opportunity for them to stay productive, adapt quickly, keep higher value jobs for the people in the region and stop losing the people to the bigger cities because they're looking for that bigger opportunity out there and we want AI can be used to do so many tasks for the business and it's important that they keep up to date with those skills so that they remain competitive themselves and from a TAFE perspective we're deliberately trying to work out what what the Gippsland area needs in regards to those training. As I mentioned before we want really practical face-to-face based training so that it can be they're actually practising and using the skills in a real use case for their business so that they can leave the training and go straight back to their office and implement it immediately. That's one of our values that we think very strongly about and we want them to help them build and embed more capabilities and AI skills across their organisation as much as we can because we know that it'll help them to remain competitive and make more money hopefully. Definitely. Do you think we're lagging or do you think maybe regional areas in general maybe lag behind the metro areas or the big city folk? Is that sort of gap that you guys have seen like come on let's build this out here and really bring us up to where we think maybe everybody else is. It's a really good question. I'll hand over to Matteo to do that but from my perspective what I've seen is it's not necessarily regional, it's more industry and how big the organisation is. So I came from working in the tertiary sector and moved across the case. Higher education was much more advanced with the AI, the thinking, the conversations. They were definitely ahead of where the case sector is. I think it's very sector based and how the organisations and associations are driving those conversations for those sectors but Matteo he works with multiple businesses across Australia so you'll probably have a better insight Matteo. Are we lagging Matteo? I think it's always very difficult to pick because like I said earlier dealing with the general purpose technology and what that means is that and it's also a technology that's happening from the ground up. We've got I think 157% year on year growth of ChatGPT users within Australia. We're the fastest growing country in the world of ChatGPT users and what that signals is that there's this bottom up adoption of the technology but what it also means is that there's pockets of this innovation happening probably throughout every single organisation whether you know it or not and what that means is that two fold, whether it's metro or whether it's rural these pockets will exist and there'll be people using the technology to their advantage already because the barriers to accessing it are so low but what it also means is that it's a really good opportunity for businesses to actually leapfrog the maturity of their systems and process and ways of working and it's funny we see this you know we work with some of Australia's largest organisations like Chemist Warehouse and there are some it's very common with AI where you can actually take a very immature business from a systems and process and ways of working and get them to actually leapfrog a lot of these organisations that have already invested millions and millions of dollars in very advanced systems so I think that if rural is lagging then it's an opportunity to leapfrog and actually get ahead of the technology and really like have a step change in their the benefits that they derive from using AI and technology as a whole I see it in marketing as well with some businesses like you can you know if you're utilising digital to where it is to sell online you're not just based around a postcode anymore there's no ceiling there anymore so you can if you're smart about it really take some of that market share from the bigger players just by being more digital minded I guess so there's some correlations there. I guess if you could each give one piece of advice to a Gippsland business owner who's genuinely curious about AI but has absolutely nothing about it yet What's the first thing you'd tell them to do? Mateo we'll start with you so Jules can think of I would say just use it that's all you need to do. Jump onto it and start talking to it. You're talking about those large language models so you chat GPT's and your Claude's. I feel like chat GPT or co-pilot at work maybe. Correct yes so just jump on and use these tools I would say even ask it how you should use it. So ask it something like hey this is my role, this is the industry I'm in this is the business that I work for ask me five questions to help me understand how I can use AI better throughout my job and it will do an incredibly good job at telling you how you should use AI and use that as your baseline for experimentation I think the biggest thing you can do is just use it, iterate, find out what works, find out what doesn't and then be curious. Yeah and Jules from a TAFE sort of perspective what would you be telling people? Communication I think using that to uplift communications I find it really helpful when it comes to writing either a workshop, email promotion or communicating a difficult email that I need to with a stakeholder or that sort of thing it's never ever going to have that personal it's not going to have you in it but it's for me it's about providing the starting point and it's so much better, like I was never taught grammar or anything like that so for me it is my writing assistant and I rely on it daily I hardly even write freely these days I just get me started and then I put in my personality and things like that so definitely communication and then as an organisation we're looking at multiple ways of doing it but around compliance and helping educators to be able to deliver interesting and exciting lessons to their learners so yeah I just love it even though it's technology it can be really super creative as well yeah no it's great I think I recently learned that I can't spell with a pen and paper in hand I'm like oh is it I before E I can't remember because everything's done online these days so yeah that was a bit of a revelation Matteo the workshops on April 22nd and 23rd who is it genuinely for and if someone's listening right now and wondering whether it's relevant to them what would you say what would be great is to see a variety of maturity levels with AI I think it's definitely for people that are looking to understand the foundations of how to use AI effectively in their roles and throughout their businesses but we'll also cover topics and like I said go from department to department real examples of how you can use AI within specific business areas so even if you are using it already it's a great opportunity for you to see some practical applications and actually have some time to experiment with with Jules and I on the night to really figure out how it's going to be best applicable to your role and we really try to make them hands on so we're going to be present in the room everyone's going to be experimenting in different ways and that often ends up becoming a very kind of like dynamic night where different people are at different stages and they're still learning even though they might be at different levels of maturity so yeah that's definitely going to be the focus of the night is giving people practical examples of how to use this technology within their business but also practicing that with the right foundational knowledge of using it responsibly and effectively yeah cool Jules is this a one off thing or is it the beginning of something bigger from TAFE to 20 in terms of digital and AI capability for the region it's definitely I'm hoping that it's not a one off attendance will be our biggest metric that we'll be using to determine if we continue to run these the more people we get in the room shows that there is definitely enthusiasm and need so but we I really want to be doing this more regularly I would love to be building more of an ecosystem to help the businesses come together and work with people like Matteo to actually come with a problem in their business or a challenge in their business and then we can help to work through that with them and how AI can potentially solve them so on the night we're going to be asking lots of questions finding out what everybody needs and yeah if we fill the room then there'll be lots more to come. Is it just over one night or two or a day? We're running what we we're doing the same workshop but on a Wednesday and a Thursday night so you can either because we figured that somebody might be playing sport on one night so we thought we'd do them have a choice but it's the same workshop on Wednesday and or the Thursday so it's just whichever whichever day is going to suit them best to come and join us and it's from four until seven at the Moorwell Tech School which is at the Moorwell campus so I know where that is over by sorry the Gippsland Tech School Gippsland Tech School yes perfect I think we've got to wrap this up now I just want to thank you both for coming on today and explaining this on the business huddle workshop at where can people get tickets and where can they go for some more information on TAFE Gippsland and on you as well and what you do Matteo? We might be supposed to answer that because she's facilitating the organisation of the event the best place to go is to go and jump on and grab a ticket which is we've got the two workshops advertised on try booking so if you go into search events on try booking and search accelerating AI it'll come up and it's got Matteo's head shot on there gotta have a face to the workshop yes exactly and so that's pretty much where all the information is at the moment is on that particular page Matteo's if you want to get to understand or meet Matteo and I highly recommend you come along on the night and do a session with him first and foremost just to give him a bit of a run for his money as well we'll be happy to have you back down in the valley Matteo of course I was born in Murray Hospital spent the first 18 months or so of my life there before coming back to your roots thank you so much both for being with me today again if you guys want to get along it's April 22nd, April 23rd very business friendly hours too I must admit so those businesses usually at work during the day so it's a couple of hour workshop at night, get along as much as you can about AI and like Matteo mentioned before just start using it jump in there, ask it how your business can best use AI just to get started I think that's the point we want to take away here. Thank you guys very much and yeah I will look to get down to your workshop as well because it's very interesting for me and bring along a couple of my AI unfriendly people who don't know how to use it thanks so much thank you so much for having us