When AI is discussed around Navigate’s virtual water cooler, we often refer to a particular ad from Salesforce, featuring Matthew McConaughey. The ad shows McConaughey dressed as a cowboy, delivering only one line:

“So, if AI’s the Wild West, who’s the sheriff around here?” – Matthew McConaughey

Our goal is not to be the sheriff, but to be more like the saloon keeper who offers sage advice to those gearing up for a voyage into the unknown. We are constantly seeing guides on the state of AI, which range from helpful (like the one below from Andreesen Horowitz) to unusable, or even misleading. The guide below, while not exhaustive of all the available tools, is still overwhelming. How many businesses, let alone individuals, have the time or resources to test and implement 50+ different AI tools?

That’s where I come in. As far as I know, I’m likely the only person crazy enough to take every single AI tool demo from the deluge of sales emails hitting my inbox every week. As Head of Innovation at Navigate, it’s imperative to have a great perspective on the landscape, and specifically which tools are worth using and implementing across different organizations. Additionally, it’s equally important for people to know that “Human intelligence (HI) is what makes things happen – not data, algorithms, or high-powered servers”, which is a quote from a book on AI called All-in On AI (a few other AI books I’ve read or plan to read are listed below).

If your business is considering diving into the Wild West of AI, there are different levels of adoption you can pursue:

  • Light: Consider activating AI-related features in existing software platforms, such as Dropbox, Zoom, Slack, Adobe, and many others. Additionally, there are other ways to dip your toes in via subscribing to a multipurpose platform like ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, or Google’s Gemini, which can help with research, copywriting, generating code, and a lot more.
  • Moderate: Adopting more niche platforms (like the 50+ listed above) that are optimized for specific tasks like graphic design, sales support, research, etc. In the long-term, these types of platforms will likely outperform the ChatGPTs of the world in most areas, but the market is flooded with low-quality options, so sorting through hundreds of demos in order to strike gold can be a challenge.
  • Advanced: Creating something brand new/customized for your business is also an option, but a costly one. This may require hiring a developer (or a team of developers) to build out a custom application which can be built on GPT-4 or one of the other large language models on the market. Just be careful that you don’t invest in building a new app only for those capabilities to be added to a platform like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. The phrase “Open AI just killed my startup” has become popular online among developers whose ideas and hours of hard work have been rendered obsolete.

 

About a year ago (which feels like 10-years in AI news), we published a blog on How AI is Already Impacting Sports & Entertainment. Of course, a lot has changed since then, but that piece contains use-cases for the fan-facing side of sports such as facial identification for ticketing, virtual facility tours for fans, automated referees, customized highlights, and more. The list below focuses more on the business efficiency and operational uses of AI which have applications beyond sports.

 

Obviously, there is a lot to consider, and Navigate’s AI focus is transforming into a full internal AI working committee to guide our thinking as we consider questions like:

  • What are existing process pain points where AI could potentially help?
  • Are we ready for AI from a data structure and governance standpoint?
  • Do existing tools already have AI capabilities we should explore?
  • Is there a more comprehensive AI solution hitting the market soon?
  • Are we sure we want AI handling this task, rather than HI?

AI Reading List

We’ll continue to monitor the latest platforms and trends and share our findings, but feel free to reach out to Matt@NVGT.com if you have any questions; and remember, if you see something, say something.