Embarking on our AI adventure at TCCC

Here at TCCC we have recently dipped our toe into the digital waters of generative AI. For the past few months I have built a weekly habit of researching and testing interesting applications of AI as a ‘curiosity focus’, and a few colleagues have joined me along the way. We are by no means experts, but we are always looking for ways to be more creative and efficient, so it felt right to dedicate some time to this.

We handle a lot of sensitive information in our line of work and Microsoft Copilot is the most secure option for us right now offering Commercial data protection. So, with our knowledge rapidly expanding and a contagious AI-driven surge of innovation sweeping the market research community, we decided to put our knowledge into practice. Here are our discoveries so far:

1.        AI is an imagination trigger

I think it is universally agreed that the hardest part of a task is getting started, particularly if the task requires creative flair. We found that with carefully designed prompts, AI has helped hugely to get the creative juices bubbling and gather momentum that can be a struggle to find alone. A successful experiment recently was applying AI to the process of creating a discussion guide. We briefed our new creative partner on the objectives and context of the session and used it to brainstorm what the key components of the guide should be. The output made us feel safe that we aren’t going to be replaced any time soon, but it led us to angles and ideas that we might not have reached simply writing the guide ourselves. We also found it particularly valuable to sense check that we had everything in the objectives covered.

2.        AI enhances the voice of the customer

As customer-centricity specialists, the voice of the customer is integral in everything we do. We used AI to summarise the individual interviews as well as the interviews as a whole by loading the transcripts into one document. It was reassuring to see the key findings it generated aligned with ours, but that it also brought to life the feelings and opinions we heard within the interviews. It would pick out quotes that evidenced our findings as well as suggesting its own, giving us confidence in our summary and helping us to make sure that every participant’s voice had a place within the story.

3.        AI has functional limitations

Beyond the creative and inspirational benefits that AI has brought to our team, it has limitations. The most important to us being that most AI chatbots are not secure. Our clients’ and customers’ privacy are priority number one for us, so we have been cautious and stuck to the closed environment of Microsoft Copilot for all client and customer specific queries. We started this AI adventure with an extensive list of ways we would like to utilise it, but our plans were unexpectedly hindered by the surprising limitation of only being to upload a maximum file size of 1MB to Copilot. This meant that we were unable to upload large word documents and PowerPoints containing images and our dreams of having a sophisticated proofreader are yet to be realised.

This feels like the first steps on our journey into the realm of generative AI tools and we will be sharing more of our learnings as we go…