This was the inaugural session of the new “Productivity with Data & AI” user group/meetup series hosted in person at the Microsoft Reactor.
The event was aimed at startup founders who want to use AI for business processes such as analysing sales data in Excel to clean/shape that data and then obtain automated insights into areas such as customer volatility and action plans for which customers to focus on.
We started with a session by Mike Weston Burt (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikewes with a 101 on how Gen AI works “under the hood” including concepts such as tokens, hallucinations, the context window and temperature.
He also covered effective prompting techniques such as Chain of thought and Few shot learning.
I then ran a short, practical exercise where attendees worked with a realistic dataset using Copilot and/or other Gen AI tools to clean and obtain insights into the data in order to drive business strategy.
The materials from the exercise are available as a portfolio solution here