Introduction

I'm Erin Peters. I am the co-founder of a company called the AI Maturity Index.

And I will caveat this talk by saying that I am the non-technical co-founder. And so I'll do my best to answer any technical questions at the end, but can also connect you with our tech team if you're curious to.

But this was a research passion project gone rogue last year. Oh, sorry. Uh-huh. Is this a bit better?

Okay, great. I'll do my best to stay over here if that's good. Okay, great.

Background

This was a research project that went rogue last year.

So I've been in the future of workspace for the last 10 years and I write about the space a lot. And I think all of us have heard this narrative that AI is gonna steal your job and it's coming for everything.

And my co-founder, who also has been in the space for a while, we were just chatting last year and realized that this is not helpful, nor did we believe that it was actually a true statement. So we decided to go out and figure out how are knowledge workers actually using AI, and is it for augmentation, automation, which tasks, and really just try to figure it out.

So we were a two person research team with zero funding, because again, this was a passion project. So we decided to build a research agent that can conduct in depth user research interviews to understand how it's actually being used, because we wanted the exploratory nature of an interview, but the scalability of a survey.

And so this has kind of snowballed. Since then, we gave people a bit of a report on how they were doing to say thank you for this research project with different benchmarks and scores because if you're a marketer, it's not helpful to be benchmarked against a software developer who's been building this technology for 20 years and so on and so forth.

The AI Maturity Index Product

So today I want to show you that product because we turned it into an automated system where anyone can chat with our agent for 15 minutes and get that report.

And then we decided to answer the question that everybody had for us, which was, so what? Because now you've told me how I'm doing, but you didn't tell me what I should do to get better. So we created a nine agent solution that gives people customized and personalized growth guides.

So I'll walk you through the experience, but we'll also watch our agents working in traces to basically see how we architected them and the roles that we gave them and maybe inspire you to build some of your own agents in the future as well.

Experience Walkthrough

So I saved you the boring part, and I've already actually gone through and done a chat, because it takes about 15 minutes to do, and I know we don't have that much time today. But I will tell you a little bit about the persona that I decided to be.

So I put on the hat of a CMO who is quite advanced in their generative AI usage, but will be adding in some goals after talking about how I want to build my own agents and get in from that standpoint.

So throughout the conversation, I told it a little bit about how frequently I'm using AI, what tools I'm using for productivity or collaboration or decision making, and the specific use cases that I had. And this is important for all of our agents because they're actually going to determine what I should do next based on all of that information that I gave.

So this is the report that everybody can get for free. Basically, it tells me that I'm an early adopter, yay me, where I am in the adoption curve, my strengths and weaknesses, and what I've been doing well. So all of this is generated based off of the conversation that I gave.

And benchmarks, it benchmarks you not only against everybody in our data set, we've collected over 270,000 data points in the last year, but it will also benchmark me against people like me in that particular role and industry as well. So I can even see different countries and their average scores and my use cases here too. Also different things like dimensions I can go through and see.

So my skill level was high, I'm customizing a fair amount and so on and so forth.

Growth Guide Overview

But I will show you the growth guide. And I'll quickly go through and pretend like I'm paying.

This promo code is only good once, so if you try it, it's not going to work. I have another one for you later if you want to try it.

But at this point, I'm going to go through and confirm all of my details. So we are all human, and sometimes we forget to add information. So I have the opportunity to tell it some additional use cases and things that I have done.

So let's say I have the barrier and I thought, oh yeah, I'm really concerned about my data privacy. I can add all of this in here and then confirm all my different answers. I'll just randomly select a few different things in here.

But the next part is really where it gets more interesting because I'm gonna tell it what I actually would like to accomplish. So I want to start building custom agents to streamline my content. workflows. I don't know why I'm shouting at it, but let's pretend that's not in caps.

Um, it's going to ask me a little bit about prompting because I was very specific about using generative AI. So what are my prompting techniques? And this is going to help me to learn some more things. So I'll do a think step by step.

I usually do give it kind of a hat to wear when I'm talking to it. And then, uh, some plain instructions, you know, when I'm doing my therapy hour with Claude every week.

What best describes the deepest way that I'm using AI today? Probably some customizations and GBTs, but I wanna learn more about creating agents. And then now I'm gonna go into the guide creation.

Agent Roles

So I'll quickly overview what some of these roles are in the traces itself. So hopefully the internet is strong enough here that I can see my actual one coming through right now, and then I will tell you about the different roles that they have, because I think it's interesting to watch them work away.

And we'll see if these guys are going to work live. It is a demo, so it's a 50-50 chance if it actually works.

I do have another one here that's working a little bit faster that I can walk you through. So there's a couple of different hats that our agents wear. One is the orchestrator.

So we have an agent that acts as the project manager. And this is the one that's going to coordinate all of the tasks between all of the other agents. Because otherwise, it is the Wild West. It is a lawless place.

Next, we have an online presence researcher. So this will actually look up the user, maybe check some context on your public profiles to see if you forgot anything or if you want to add additional context in there. And it's also going to talk to a market researcher who says, I want you to look at other CMOs in the software and tech industry and see what they're doing. Do they have any best use cases, top tools that are being mentioned live?

Because for a lot of us, when we're trying to find things, it's challenging to know what's relevant right now and the landscape is ever changing. So if I read an article, is it still accurate today as it was three weeks ago? Not always.

Then it kicks back to the orchestrator and it goes back and forth a few times. We have a data profiler. So this is what goes through our data set of 275,000 data points or so to figure out if there's any relevant tools and use cases to recommend from here as well.

And we have a narrative strategist who knows how to work with our profile creators so that we can craft this into something that is readable and makes sense and is kind of like a coaching format.

But one that I think is particularly cool and was a great idea from our developer was a user feedback simulator. So we actually have an agent that pretends to be you, our user,

to give feedback on the guide and say whether or not they like it and then actually give it back to the orchestrator to redo any steps that we didn't think were probably up to snuff of what the users would have then it goes back and forth a few more times and then we get the final output which is the guide so let's refresh and see if the one that i had here is generated but i have a backup if it is not so you can see that all of these guys have been working away

It went back and forth to the orchestrator, the presence researchers here, and it's not done yet. Okay.

Personal Growth Guide Report

So I will show you my personal growth guide report, which is not too dissimilar from the other one that we're going through, but it gave me a 90 day plan here. Um, so it gives me my executive summary, some additional benchmarks based off of the additional information, and then it will give me all of my different tips and tricks. So my AI tier is leader, but I do have some very clear identified gaps based on where I need to go with my goals because I'm not currently building any agents from scratch myself.

So we have different training models here too that are going to reinforce how the agents are doing, which I think is great. but it gives me different specific goals and tools and things to use based on what I said. So typically it will encourage you to do more in-depth use cases of the tool that you already use and have mentioned.

It'll give you some ideas for new tools that you can try and use cases. and then just kind of advance that in specific tasks and workflows. So really trying to solve the problem that we were thinking that everybody feels a little bit behind in AI, wants to learn things, but it's really hard to find anything that's relevant to you.

Conclusion

So yeah, this is our growth guides and product. We are still very much in the feedback gathering stage. So if you do try it, I would love to hear from you and see how it is going.

We just launched this product on Thursday, um, and saw, I think a six and a half percent growth in our overall user base, which was really, really cool for us. So you guys are like some of the first people seeing this in any type of live presentation, but I hope it was interesting to you and definitely want you guys to be able to give it a shot.

Trial and Feedback

So if you do want to give it a shot, you can scan this code here. And you can talk to the agents. As I mentioned, all of that first report is entirely free. So you can share that with as many people as you'd like. Uh, that's part of our kind of mission is to help different workers understand where they are and get that compass with their usage.

I see a few more. Phones, awesome.

Contact Information

And if you have questions, comments, feedback for me, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, I am the non-technical co-founder, but if you have questions for our dev team and my other co-founder who is more technical than me, I'm happy to connect to you and continue the conversation here as well.