What I’m Seeing#
Boy, it’s been busy! Trainings and prepping with a quickly evolving landscape. This issue should have reached you two weeks ago, and it didn’t. Mahalo for sticking with me.
Part of the reason is close to home. Hawaiʻi Business Gym kicks off in Hilo on Thursday, October 8, and the prep has had me running. Six Hawaiʻi Island businesses are getting ready to work on one real operational challenge each, and I’m excited to get started with them.
Meanwhile, a lot has happened in the AI world. New models from Anthropic and OpenAI, agent apps from xAI and ChatGPT, and now Jev, a new kind of model from TypeSafe AI, plus OpenAI’s Decisions API, which is in limited preview. Some of the biggest names in the field are even saying out loud that it’s all moving too fast. If you feel like you can’t keep up, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to.
I use AI every day, and here are some practical tips to take away. The AIs are specializing. They’re not all one thing anymore. So “which AI should I use?” is becoming the wrong question. The better question is: what kind of job is this?
I sort jobs into three kinds.
Rules, defined procedures, decision points (if/then). Totals on an invoice. Your pricing math. A rule like “orders over $500 get a call.” This is deterministic work, and it’s very useful. You don’t want a chatbot getting creative with it. A spreadsheet or a simple automation is the right tool, and a good one never has a bad day. And by the way, it’s CHEAP to use.
Classify or rank this. Is this email urgent? Which of these five leads gets a call first? Jev and the Decisions API live here. You give it a situation and a list of choices, and it picks one. Jev also tells you how confident it is. This is semi-deterministic: a steady, repeatable kind of answer, with judgment built in. It’s still new, and reviewers suggest keeping a person involved for the bigger calls, which makes sense to me. Also CHEAP to use. We’re putting this to work at Kealani on our own voice agent and our RFP analyzer, and it’s fast and easy to use.
Think and build with me. Drafting, brainstorming, working through a hard decision. This is where the AI assistants shine. They’re powerful and can do amazing things, but they’re not always necessary. They do cost real money, and you may have seen in the news that some companies are getting big bills.
Most owners I talk with are asking one tool to do all three jobs.
Our businesses are hungry to do something that works. That’s what I love about our local businesses: they roll up their sleeves and get it done. If you’ve been reading these for a while, I’m sure you see the theme. Define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. For the Six Sigma fans out there, yes, that’s DMAIC, and it still applies, probably more today than ever. AI can help us make our mistakes faster and get us nowhere faster. That’s why I feel so blessed to help our local businesses do just this. In the Gym, we’ll bring the practicality of all these tools together and learn how to apply them, so we can help each other grow. Matching the job to the tool is a big part of that.
Quick Win#
Write down five things you did at work last week. Next to each one, mark it R (rules, same answer every time), C (classify or rank), or T (think and build with me). Five minutes. You’ll likely spot a job you’ve been giving to the wrong tool.
Try This#
Give your AI this assignment:
Here are five tasks from my week at my [type of business] in Hawaiʻi: [list them]. For each one, tell me whether it’s a rules job (same answer every time), a classify-or-rank job (pick between options), or a think-and-build job (I need a partner). Then suggest
The Invitation#
Reply and tell me which job you’ve been giving to the wrong tool. I’d love to learn from what you find, and share it back.
And if you’re in Hilo, save the date: Hawaiʻi Business Gym Showcase Day is Thursday, November 19, from 3 to 5 PM at the Rose and Raymond Tseng Terrace at UH Hilo. It’s open to the public. Come see what our fellow business owners have made to help their businesses.
Aloha, Michelle
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Stronger Businesses. Stronger Hawaiʻi. Hawaiʻi Business Gym is a six-week Kealani Solutions cohort for Hawaiʻi Island businesses, built around one operational challenge per participant. Learn more at kealanisolutions.com/hawaii-business-gym.
Funded in part by the Hawaiʻi Technology Development Corporation (HTDC).
I draft with AI I have set up to write in my voice and to use only my company’s verified facts. Then I edit, fact-check, and approve everything you read. Building workflows like this for Hawaiʻi businesses is what I do.
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