Responding to RFPs used to feel like running a marathon (it’s just as painful as being on the RFP assessment team) – days of effort, multiple people, and thousands in costs. Recently, I asked myself: Could AI make this easier? What started as an experiment (we are always experimenting with the edge of this technology) with Microsoft’s Agent Framework on a local setup evolved into a multi-agent orchestration system that drafts RFP responses in under 15 minutes.
Tag: #AI
Reading LLMs Like Patients: What DSM-5 Can Teach Us About AI Behaviour
Most of the time, when we talk about large language models (LLMs), we end up in the weeds of training data and parameter counts. Useful if you’re a researcher; less useful if you’re a leader, policymaker, or practitioner trying to answer a simpler question:
“Is this thing actually behaving in a way I’m comfortable with?”
Two realities make that hard:
The training data is too large for humans to grasp in any meaningful way.
The models are too complex for us to truly understand their internal “decision making.”
But their outputs – the words they put on the page – are something we can read, interrogate, and assess.
From Formulas to Conversations: How Excel’s Agent Mode Will Redefine Data Analytics
It used to be great to find others that ‘spoke Excel’ – understood the intricacies of the various lookup formulas or when to use index…match. I have spent some time working with Excel Labs Agent Mode and the ‘old’ Excel world is about to change dramatically.
Excel Agent Mode has arrived as part of Microsoft’s Frontier preview program, and after testing it myself to create survey data for my training courses, I can see this isn’t just another incremental update (spreadsheet link included in Further Reading section below). It might make those ribbon menus obsolete.
Unlock Your Legacy Code: The GenAI Shortcut for BAs & Devs
It happened to me a quite a few years ago when I resurrected some of my C code from the 90’s and brought it up to date and if you’re a Business Analyst or Developer, you’ve been there as well: trying to decipher a legacy system with outdated documentation and only a handful of power users to guide you. Traditionally, we’ve relied on user interviews and painstaking manual testing to map out functionality. Using LLM’s, combined with the more traditional methods can give us extra insight.
GenAI Data Analysis: Google Colab’s Gemini vs. Excel Copilot — Which One Should You Use for Conversational Data Analytics?
AI assistants are now integrated into the data tools you use daily, helping to reveal the stories and patterns in your data with natural language commands. Two of the tools I have been working with lately are Google’s ‘Analyse with Gemini’ in their Colab Notebooks and Microsoft’s Copilot in Excel with it’s ‘Advanced Analysis’ prompt. These tools, while on the surface appear similar, do have differences that make them suitable for different types of users.