One of the things I love about my job is that I get to speak to small business owners across the U.S. and show them how to reduce some of their pain points using generative AI.
I’m an AI scientist for Amazon Web Services, and I’m part of a team that focuses on responsible AI, checking our systems and AI models for things like fairness, biases, transparency, robustness, and more. I’m also an AWS “tech evangelist,” which means I go out and speak to individuals and companies about AI—how to use it, and how to do so responsibly.
I think it’s important to let more small business owners know how many easy-to-use gen AI tools are available to them—to help them be more productive and to ultimately grow their business. These tools can help them automate time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks, and free them up to focus on more valuable work and on their customers.
I’ve been travelling around the U.S. meeting small business owners and entrepreneurs, and showing them how to use PartyRock—AWS’s free, app building tool, built on Amazon Bedrock—which lets anyone create apps in minutes. I worked with 10 businesses and organizations in three cities—Seattle, Atlanta, and Las Vegas—to help them be more productive in their day-to-day tasks.
The cool part? None of these apps require any technical skills to design or use. Anyone can use generative AI to simplify their business workflows.
Here are five examples of how to use PartyRock, which I shared with small business owners in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Atlanta, Georgia, and how it can help boost their productivity. For even more ideas, you can watch all 10 videos from all three cities here.
1. Start with your tedious tasks
Drew, head of marketing at Meow Wolf Omega Mart—a mind-scrambling, ‘supermarket’ art experience in Las Vegas—wanted to reduce the time it takes him to manually look through thousands of customers’ feedback forms, to gain insights to help inform sales and marketing initiatives. I showed Drew how PartyRock could analyze this feedback in seconds via the document upload function, and then create a customer-facing app to make Meow Wolf merchandise recommendations, based on people’s answers to certain questions about their experience.
2. Work backwards from your pain points
Vegas Balloon Rides’ manager JJ needs to look at weather forecasts and other factors to predict the ideal time and day to fly his hot air balloons. While Partyrock could not build an app to do this for him yet, I showed JJ how to use the tool to generate a technical roadmap and cost analysis for developing a mobile app that could—saving him hours of manual data tracking, project planning, and researching quotes for the software development cycle. As a software developer myself, I found the roadmap PartyRock laid out to be spot-on.
3. Always keep a human in the loop
In Atlanta, I showed Tim, general manager of StretchLab in Snellville, how to create a text rewriter app. It can produce text messages and emails, in a variety of styles (for everyone from retirees to millennials to Gen Z), in just a few seconds. Tim said he could probably produce about 20 emails in 30 minutes using the app, when it would usually take him more than an hour to do the same amount on his own. I encouraged Tim to keep in mind that generative AI isn’t perfect and can sometimes make mistakes. So it’s important to always be aware of your intended outcomes, and make sure you have a human in the loop to double-check the accuracy of the information AI is providing.
4. Remember: you don’t need to be an expert
Wadada Healthy Market and Juice Bar in Atlanta’s historic West End neighborhood needed investor funding to expand to at least one new location. I showed the owner Nilajah how she can use PartyRock to help launch a crowdfunding campaign and to create an investor pitch deck—including a competitive analysis of similar juice bars in the area, and financial projections for the next three to five years—to help her market her business to potential investors.
I’m excited to see how Nilajah can expand her business. This use case is another good reminder that you don’t need to be an expert to use generative AI. Easy-to-use tools like PartyRock can act as an assistant and help you be more productive every day.
5. Experiment with different prompts
Shaniqua’s company, Pearl Salon Suites, offers beauty professionals the opportunity to rent a space alongside their peers. Shaniqua needs to reach three main audience groups—beauty professionals who might want to rent a space, customers looking for beauty services, and potential franchisees for new locations—and one of her big challenges is online visibility.
I showed her how to use PartyRock to produce blogs on different topics of interest to the audience groups she wants to target. By creating relevant content, tying it to her business offering, and including specific keywords, PartyRock can very quickly help to improve her website content and resulting visibility in search.
When you’re working with generative AI, the quality of the output very much depends on the quality of the input. Be as precise and specific as possible when you’re asking the AI a question or giving instructions, and be prepared to experiment and play around until you get the outcome you’re looking for.
Bonus tip: anyone can get started with AI
Few people can say that listening to American jazz collective Snarky Puppy led them to a career in artificial intelligence, but that’s how I got started. I was at college studying computer engineering, and I downloaded the music recognition app Shazam to identify one of the group’s songs.
I wanted to understand how the app worked, and when I found out that it used machine learning, it sparked my imagination. Since then, I have earned a Ph.D., became the chief technology officer of a successful image recognition startup that was bought by Amazon, joined Amazon as an applied scientist, and founded a nonprofit education organization in my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi.
But just because I have a Ph.D., it doesn’t mean you need one to use AI. Don’t be intimidated; you never know where your curiosity may take you. You can create a free PartyRock account and a free AWS Educate account to learn about working with AI and machine learning (ML). And if you’re interested in a career in AI/ML, take a look at the the AWS Careers website for opportunities.
