poseycorp helps innovators become great communicators. (Sometimes by sending out helpful stuff in a newsletter.)
ISSUE 154
Confusion. It's bad.
"The best design is the simplest one that works."
-- Albert Einstein
It’s been almost eighteen months since OpenAI changed the entire tech industry with the public launch of ChatGPT. All of us in tech lost our minds. And then, in short order, so did everyone else - in media, in government, in academia.
Whenever a seminal technology
shift captures public consciousness, we in the tech industry fall all over ourselves to show that we at our company understand the fabulous new thing better than our competitors. This jockeying for both technical and thought supremacy happened with the web, it happened with mobile. It’s been happening, at frenzy level, since November 30, 2022.
Last month on northbound Highway 101 I saw a startup’s billboard touting that they used RAG. What’s next? A billboard that says “Everyone loves our multimodal embeddings!”
As an industry, we are making monumentally important decisions about how generative AI should be built, safeguarded and deployed.
But as everyone in the industry fights for technical and commercial supremacy, it’s easy to forget that end users (whether at the global enterprise or
Grandma with an iPad level) really just care about what they can do with this incredible technology. Can we work and play better? Faster? Smarter? Safer? Very few users have opinions on whether or how you use Hugging Face for multimodal embeddings.
You may choose to go into deep
detail in a user or a developer conference, but don’t do this with the CEO of a mid-market insurance company. When you make your prospective C-Suite customer feel stupid by starting your pitch deck with ten architecture slides on how RAG works, they will find a way to make it YOUR fault that they don’t understand. And it IS your fault.
Eighty percent of your line of business customers can probably only understand twenty percent of what you want to tell them. So DON’T tell them unless and until they ask.
“Here’s our high-level approach. RAG is a powerful means to achieve our objectives. If any of
you would like me to double-click on how we’ll use RAG, please let me know.”
Your customers want to enter this promising and terrifying AI era in the right way, with the right strategy and the right guardrails. They want us to help them, not to watch us fight and posture amongst ourselves.
If you want to brag about how your RAG approach is way better than anyone else’s, Stack Overflow is a much better place to do so than Highway 101.
On
poseyblog
We're sharing tips for being a better public speaker:
“I thought it was pretty outstanding,” said a client, who’d been through lots of speech coaching, after hearing my presentation.
If you’d like great results, schedule a conversation with me! It’s easy! Reach me at inquiries@poseycorp.com.
Not sure how to crush your next presentation? Persuade that difficult customer or team member? Navigate tough questions from regulators, press, your boss? How about some pragmatic, actionable communications advice?
If you are a startup founder, an intrapreneur at a company, or a leader looking to grow, consider Office Hours with Lisa, a great way to get bite-sized, personalized communications coaching. Because your business must scale and you must scale with it. Because it’s the great communicators who create change!
