Using AI to «Think Different»: Innovative Prompt Engineering How can AI help us generate new solutions to our challenges?
Lately, I've come across discussions on social media about whether AI will replace humans, even in creative tasks, or if it might soon autonomously direct the innovation process. Others argue that it is precisely in creative tasks where AI can contribute the least.
To test this, we have conducted experiments over the last 6 months with more than 40 AI tools. First, we simulated some innovation workshops with AI that we had conducted with clients to compare the results. Then, we conducted real workshops using the AI tools that seemed most useful to us.
And we reached a very clear conclusion: the real potential of AI in innovation is unlocked when it is skillfully combined with human insight. Well-guided AI facilitates the process, accelerates it, provides us with more powerful and more disruptive ideas, and helps transform them into stronger value propositions. But it does not work by simply putting a challenge into Chat GPT and waiting for it to provide interesting solutions...
There's a key concept that will likely be talked about a lot in the coming months: PROMPT ENGINEERING. It's about optimizing the instructions we give to ChatGPT, or other AI tools, to optimize their work and get a response that brings us value.
For us, in seeking innovative solutions, we call it INNOVATIVE PROMPT ENGINEERING. And we have already incorporated it into our workshops.
In a future post, I will give more details, but there are several factors to consider, and they are not the same when we look for answers in ChatGPT as when we generate images in Midjourney or DALL-E, or improve texts in Wordtune. But broadly speaking, it's understood that if we explain more and better what we want, AI provides more interesting answers.
In summary, with humans providing the right instructions at each step (to reframe the problem, generate ideas, land them, define experiments, optimize the pitch...) and selecting the best results, AI significantly improves the search for new solutions to any type of challenge and is creating a new paradigm in business innovation. To take advantage of this, companies can train their people in Prompt Engineering and the use of some AI tools, or they can seek help from qualified consultants. I sense that we innovation consultants will also have to reinvent ourselves to master these new tasks, because AI will take over some tasks we have performed for years, and because we will add more value in other ways. At Inteligencia Creativa, we have already embarked on this path that, more than any other, will be made by walking.