The Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce recently hosted a two-part series to show local member companies exactly how to utilize best practices in the changing generative artificial intelligence environment.
The chamber’s Generative AI Task Force hosted the first webinar on Aug. 20 and the second last week, exclusively for chamber members.
Cordes Owen, CEO and founder of Bake More Pies, led the first webinar alongside the company’s VP of AI, John Toner. Owen said the company’s “hands on the keyboard” approach has paid dividends in utilizing and implementing the technology early in its business practices.
“When we present [sessions] like this, we like to boil it down to tangible things that people can do and how they can use the technology,” Owen said. “At our core, we’re a digital agency, so we understand technology, websites and software very well. When we saw how this would impact the world in the marketing and advertising sense, we quickly built infrastructure around delivering generative AI enablement and being able to provide it to our customers.”
At Bake More Pies, Owen said they utilize AI internally and for clients. Cordes said they have multiple integrations with companies already, where they are enhancing customer support and technical support departments.
“We’re helping do generative AI readiness through data organization because you can’t use any of this technology if your data is all over the place,” Owen said. “That’s what we took to bring to this session, how to make people a lot more efficient.”
For example, Owen said that after talking with recruiting companies, Bake More Pies created a generative AI tool that is set to launch to help in the recruitment process — just one example of tools the company is creating to speed up efficiency.
Member company participants like Holly Tomlin of the Tomlin St Cyr Real Estate Services group attended both sessions.
“I love the educational component of the chamber,” Tomlin said. “When they offered up this AI [session], we just bounced on it because we all wanted to learn as much as we could about it, use it, and then figure out the best ways to implement it in the business.”
Tomlin, who’s been involved with the chamber for 38 years, said the real estate agency participated in the webinar as a group. She said they found how to utilize AI in data analysis particularly helpful.
“We’re looking forward to seeing how we can take some of the low load tasks and utilize generative AI that will make us more efficient so that we can focus on more client-facing [tasks],” Tomlin said.
Owen said at the end of the day, creative thinking is the key.
“Generative AI is the only tool that can actually go in, understand, pull and extract data easily, map it to a temporary database, and then do comparisons. There’s a lot of elegance in simplifying these concepts,” Owen said. “We tried to speak about them in a business way to make it less scary for everybody and just encourage them to start experimenting with it.”
