10 Step Guide to Problem Solving With Artificial Intelligence

One of the biggest misconceptions of AI has to be that it’s a shortcut. While it absolutely can make the execution of tasks more simple, it sets a new bar in terms of what people can achieve and doesn’t just help them avoid work altogether. But this is assuming you’re willing to put in the effort to understand and utilize AI effectively.

The extent to which one person can achieve is no longer limited to their unique capabilities. As a result, the problems they can solve scale exponentially which when starting a business can become lucrative before needing to hire staff. If we’re going to dive deeper into this, we need to think about all the facets involved in utilizing AI for problem-solving in business.

Full Leverage of Artificial Intelligence Integration

Utilizing AI for problem-solving in business typically involves two key aspects: internal operations and customer experience. A general overview of these aspects is as follows: 

Internal Operations:

• AI ensures data management is effective, guaranteeing data quality and accessibility for other AI solutions being used. If we look at financial services, AI can detect patterns in data which can improve risk management and guidance— especially for clients.

• AI automates tasks by leveraging machine learning algorithms to make predictions or decisions without explicitly being programmed to do so. For instance, think of QA; AI can identify issues early and minimize the need for manual inspection. In manufacturing, this is great for anticipating system failures.

• Supply chain optimization with AI enhances efficiency and delivery. By analyzing demand patterns and production capacities, AI can identify bottlenecks and streamline procurement.

Customer Experience:

• AI enables personalized experiences based on customer data and preferences. For example, an e-commerce platform can use algorithms to suggest products based on the customer's browsing and purchase history.

• AI chatbots provide 24/7 support and quick issue resolution.

• Analysis of customer feedback helps improve products and services. A hotel chain for instance can use AI to analyze every customer review or article written about them and find areas they need to improve. This is great for any business trying to identify specific pain points and then make data-driven decisions when looking to enhance products or services.

The future of your business, no matter what industry you're in, is going to either be very bright or a flash in the pan depending on how you adjust to the new standards of solving problems. These problems go both inside and outside of your organization.

10-Steps to Problem-Solving with AI

When you feel there is an opportunity to leverage AI to find a solution, this is typically the process you’ll want to follow:

1) Define the Problem: Clearly articulate the problem you want to solve with AI. Understand the context, challenges, and desired outcomes.

2) Collect and Prepare Data: Collect relevant data from diverse sources and ensure it is cleaned and organized for the AI to analyze.

3) Choose the Right AI Technique: Select the most suitable AI technique, whether it's machine learning or natural language processing, to address your problem.

4) Train and Test the AI Model: Train the AI model with labeled data and evaluate its performance using test datasets.

5) Interpret and Validate Results: Analyze AI-generated insights, understand limitations, and validate results with domain experts.

6) Iterate and Refine: Keep improving your AI model and problem-solving approach based on feedback and outcomes.

7) Implement and Monitor: Implement the AI solution in real scenarios and monitor its performance.

8) Address Ethical Considerations: Ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI-driven decision-making. In other words, strive to avoid biases because transparency in AI algorithms and decision-making is vital to building trust with stakeholders.

9) Embrace AI for Customer Experience: Use AI to personalize customer interactions, offer 24/7 support, and assess feedback to improve offerings.

10) Integrate AI in Internal Operations: Automate tasks, optimize processes and leverage AI-driven analytics for decision-making and efficiency.

How it Looks in Action

Talk without action means nothing, especially in business. With that in mind, here is a concept of what it might look like when a company goes through this process:

Telecommunications Example

Imagine a telecommunications company that is facing a challenge with customer churn rates (the number of customers who cancel their subscriptions or switch to competitors). 

Step 1: Define the Problem

The telecommunications company identifies the need to reduce customer churn and retain existing customers. They want to develop a strategy to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Step 2: Collect and Prepare the Data

The company gathers a vast amount of customer data, including call records, service usage patterns, customer feedback, and social media interactions. The data is organized and cleaned to make sure it’s accurate.

Step 3: Choose the Right AI Technique

The company goes with machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data and identify patterns that lead to churn. Natural language processing is then used to extract insights from customer feedback and social media interactions. 

Step 4: Train and Test the AI Model

The AI model is trained using historical data on customer churn. The model is then tested with a separate dataset to evaluate its accuracy in predicting churn.

Step 5: Interpret and Validate Results

The model provides insights into customer behaviour and identifies factors contributing to churn. The company validates the results with domain experts to ensure their accuracy and relevance.

Step 6: Iterate and Refine

Based on feedback and outcomes, the telecommunications company iteratively refines the AI model and strategies to better address the issue.

Step 7: Implement and Monitor

The company implements targeted customer retention strategies based on the AI-provided insights and closely monitors their effectiveness.

Step 8: Address Ethical Considerations

The telecommunications company ensures transparency in its AI algorithms and decision-making processes to build trust with customers. Biases are identified and mitigated.

Step 9: Embrace AI for Customer Experience

Customer interactions are personalized, and the AI provides tailored offers and enhances customer support.

Step 10: Integrate AI in Internal Operations

AI-driven analytics are employed in internal operations such as optimizing network performance and maintenance, the goal is to improve efficiency and quality of service.

The Takeaway

The one thing there will never be a shortage of in business is problems. As the way we solve problems innovates, knowing how to leverage tools to optimize your internal and external operations becomes the most vital business skill. If you don’t love your product, what makes you think someone else is going to? Learn the next steps in integrating AI in your business here.

Written By Ben Brown

—

ISU Corp is an award-winning software development company, with over 17 years of experience in multiple industries, providing cost-effective custom software development, technology management, and IT outsourcing.

Our unique owners’ mindset reduces development costs and fast-tracks timelines. We help craft the specifications of your project based on your company's needs, to produce the best ROI. Find out why startups, all the way to Fortune 500 companies like General Electric, Heinz, and many others have trusted us with their projects. Contact us here.

Best Chat GPT Plug-ins For Software Development

We know about the prompts Chat GPT has to offer software developers, which are great starting points— but truly, they are nowhere near the full scope of leveraging streamlined workflows from AI. Since the dawn of its existence, coding has been about 3 things; creativity, problem-solving, and innovation. With artificial intelligence, the horizon for these aspects of coding expands exponentially.

Plug-ins elevate this further, especially when a programmer knows exactly which to use and when. What plug-ins do is leverage AI algorithms to cut down the development process by automating tasks and getting data-driven insights. A typical scenario for development with plug-ins might look like this:

Scenario of Leveraging Plug-ins

A programmer is working on developing a web application for a client. The project involves developing systems for user authentication and authorization, implementing complex business logic, integrating with external APIs, and load balancing. The deadline is also tight. 

To start, they use a plug-in that automates the process of setting up secure user authentication systems, including user registration, login, password encryption, and session management. Once that’s done, they go to an AI-driven tool that will give them 3 things; intelligent suggestions, code templates, and algorithms for handling not just super complex workflows, but also calculations. Still with me? We’re almost there.

As the project involves integration with external APIs, the programmer moves to an AI-based tool that simplifies the process of connecting to external services. The main purpose of this tool is 4 things: automatically generating code for authentication, making API requests, handling responses, and managing errors. By now, communication with external APIs is seamless and they move on to the last phase. 

They need load balancing for performance and scalability. For this reason, they use a tool that does 3 things: monitors server loads, distributes incoming traffic across servers, and optimizes resource allocation. With this, the workload can be distributed which ultimately lets the system handle user traffic without compromising stability. 

Throughout this entire process, the programmer is leveraging a tool that analyzes code and performance metrics. The Chat GPT plug-ins utilize these insights and data from the analysis to generate code snippets and insights. So if you thought plug-ins were limited to providing prompts, think again. With that said, here are some Chat GPT plug-ins that developers need to pay attention to:

Zapier

This is likely the most popular integration tool as it integrates over 5,000 apps with ChatGPT. You can connect apps like Google Sheets, Gmail, and Slack directly to ChatGPT. Users can leverage any of Zapier's 50,000 actions, such as search, update, and write to automate tasks. 

Code Interpreter

Although currently in a closed alpha phase, this plug-in is very promising for the future of software development. It enables the execution of Python code directly within a chat session with ChatGPT. The plugin allows users to upload and download files, make code adjustments, and even receive suggestions and modifications from ChatGPT. 

ChatWithGit

ChatWithGit is a plugin that enables users to search GitHub directly within the ChatGPT interface. It allows users to find relevant code snippets and provides a preview of the code along with a link to the corresponding repository. This feature saves developers time by leveraging existing code resources on GitHub without having to reinvent the wheel.

Visual ChatGPT Studio

Visual ChatGPT Studio is an extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace. It integrates with Visual Studio. Its features include method code autocompletion, adding unit tests, bug detection, method optimization, explanation writing, commenting, providing summaries for C# methods, and users can ask questions (code-related questions) and get answers within the editor.

Prompt Perfect

The Prompt Perfect plug-in helps users create effective prompts by optimizing and rewording them for better results. It’s also not exclusive to ChatGPT. All you do as a user is begin your prompt with “perfect” followed by your request. 

Wolfram Alpha

The Wolfram Alpha plugin addresses ChatGPT's limitations in math. It gives ChatGPT access to computation, math functionalities, curated knowledge, and real-time data through Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram language. Using this plugin, ChatGPT can give you improved responses and visualizations for math-related queries.

Link Reader

Link Reader enables ChatGPT to extract and analyze information from various types of links, like PDFs, PPTs, Word docs, and all the fun stuff alike. Users then have ChatGPT translate, summarize, interpret, and even analyze the contents of the given link, to get insights far more in-depth than a typical search engine.

Moving Forward

Emad Mostaque's statement that "There are no developers in 5 years" is something companies in the tech space need to really think about. The amount that one person can achieve increases exponentially with AI-powered tools. And trust me, you won’t lose your job to a machine, but the person who knows how to leverage machines will blindside you.

Written By Ben Brown

—

ISU Corp is an award-winning software development company, with over 17 years of experience in multiple industries, providing cost-effective custom software development, technology management, and IT outsourcing.

Our unique owners’ mindset reduces development costs and fast-tracks timelines. We help craft the specifications of your project based on your company's needs, to produce the best ROI. Find out why startups, all the way to Fortune 500 companies like General Electric, Heinz, and many others have trusted us with their projects. Contact us here.

33 Chat GPT Prompts For Software Developers

There’s the notion that some people know how to use Chat GPT far better than others simply by the prompts they use. It’s not an unfair statement by any means, but it required some digging on our part to uncover the best Chat GPT prompts tailored specifically for software developers. As developers, we are always on the lookout for tools and techniques that can enhance our productivity and make our lives easier.

Now, what we outline here is by no means definitive and should instead be taken as signifiers of the endless possibilities that Chat GPT offers to programmers. With that said, here are some prompts for you to try:

Basic Prompts

• “Provide an example of code that achieves [specific task]”

• “Share the best practices for [specific language or framework] development”

• “Assist me in debugging this code snippet. I'm facing an issue with [specific problem]”

• “Suggest efficient algorithms for solving [specific problem]”

• “Offer recommendations to improve the user experience of my application”

• “Provide insights on the latest trends in [specific technology]”

• “Explain the concept of [specific concept] in simple terms”

The blank spaces within these prompts are up to you. If you wanted to get more specific, it’d look something like this:

More Specific Prompts

“Create a Python script to parse JSON files and extract specific data with the following requirements:

• Ability to handle large JSON files efficiently

• Support for nested JSON structures

• Robust error handling and logging mechanism

• Develop a Node.js microservice for e-commerce that includes endpoints for user authentication, product listing, cart management, and order processing, and adheres to the RESTful design pattern”

• “Write a Java function to filter an ArrayList based on a given condition with the following inputs: the ArrayList of objects, the filtering condition as a lambda expression, and the expected output: the filtered ArrayList”

• “Design a C++ algorithm to solve the travelling salesman problem using the branch and bound strategy”

• “Implement a JavaScript function that handles file uploads asynchronously with the following inputs: the file object, the target directory, and the expected output: a success or error message indicating the status of the upload process”

• “Provide a code snippet in Python that calculates the average of a list of numbers”

• “Design a RESTful API using Node.js and Express for a music streaming service. Include endpoints for user registration, playlist creation, song recommendation, and user authentication”

• “Write a C# function that checks if a given string is a palindrome and returns a boolean value”

• “Develop a Java program that implements a binary search algorithm for finding an element in a sorted array”

• “Create a PHP script that generates a random password with specific requirements such as a minimum length, inclusion of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters”

• “Design an object-oriented class structure in C++ for a library management system. Include classes for books, patrons, and the ability to handle book borrowing and returning”

• “Implement a JavaScript function that converts a string representation of a date into a Date object and performs date manipulation operations such as adding or subtracting days”

• “Develop a Python script that interacts with a database to retrieve specific data based on user input. Ensure the script handles database connections, executes queries, and provides appropriate error handling”

• “Design a web application using Django framework for an online marketplace. Include features such as user registration, product listing, shopping cart management, and order processing”

• “Write a Ruby method that sorts an array of objects based on a specific attribute in ascending order. Consider inputs such as the array of objects and the attribute to sort by”

• “Implement a TypeScript function that validates user input in a form and provides real-time feedback. The function should handle input validation rules, display error messages, and trigger validation on input change”

• “Create a PHP script that generates QR codes for a given set of data. Ensure the script handles data encoding, QR code generation, and provides the generated QR code as an output”

• “Design an algorithm in Java to find the shortest path between two nodes in a graph using Dijkstra's algorithm. Consider inputs such as the graph structure, start and end nodes, and expected output of the shortest path”

• “Develop a Node.js microservice for a chat application that includes features such as user authentication, real-time messaging, and message history retrieval”

• “Write a Python function that calculates the factorial of a given number recursively. The function should handle non-negative integers as inputs and provide the calculated factorial as an output”

• “Implement a C# program that reads and processes data from a CSV file. The program should handle parsing the CSV file, extracting specific columns or rows, and performing data manipulation or analysis”

• “Create a JavaScript function that generates a random colour code in RGB format. The function should provide the generated colour code as an output”

• “Develop a Python script that scrapes data from a website and generates a report summarizing specific information, such as product prices, ratings, and reviews”

• “Create a mobile app using React Native that allows users to create and share personalized digital greeting cards with customizable templates, text, and images”

• “Write a Java program that simulates a simple banking system with features like account creation, deposits, withdrawals, and balance inquiries. Implement error handling for cases such as insufficient funds or invalid transactions”

• “Design a web-based project management tool using Ruby on Rails, which includes features like task assignment, progress tracking, file sharing, and team collaboration”

• “Implement a sentiment analysis algorithm in Python that analyzes a text document or a stream of tweets and determines the overall sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) of the content”

These prompts are going to be something you experiment with and tailor to your needs as you go through the programming process. You can get super specific and continue to give the output back to Chat GPT until you get the ideal response. For instance, if you wanted to use the first more specific prompt we listed; to develop a Python script that will parse JSON files and extract specific data, you can start with the prompt:

“Create a Python script to parse JSON files and extract specific data with the following requirements…”

It’s not likely that the system is always going to give you exactly what you’re looking for on the first request, in that case, say something like “I've reviewed the initial code generated, but I'm still encountering issues when parsing nested JSON structures. How can I modify the code to fix this?”

The key is to be as descriptive as possible, if you just say “It’s not working”, you’re going to be going back and forth with the system for a long and painful time. Treat Chat GPT like your programming therapist; “The code fails to retrieve data from nested objects. I receive a 'KeyError' when trying to access certain fields. How can I modify the code to fix this?".

What’s next?

Chat GPT just announced Code Interpreter, which is going to revamp how we understand the coding process beyond using prompts in Chat GPT. However, knowing how to use prompts like these will certainly be a valuable prerequisite when moving on to more advanced systems like Code Interpreter.

If you’re more interested in integrating AI capabilities into your company, check out our AI consulting page for more information.

Written By Ben Brown

—

ISU Corp is an award-winning software development company, with over 17 years of experience in multiple industries, providing cost-effective custom software development, technology management, and IT outsourcing.

Our unique owners’ mindset reduces development costs and fast-tracks timelines. We help craft the specifications of your project based on your company's needs, to produce the best ROI. Find out why startups, all the way to Fortune 500 companies like General Electric, Heinz, and many others have trusted us with their projects. Contact us here.