Simple, brilliant AI basics a.k.a. don’t forget your pigeons 

I’ve been thinking about peacocks vs pigeons. While peacocks dazzle with flashy feathers, pigeons quietly and humbly get things done – navigating cities, delivering messages, and adapting to any environment. You may wonder why I am talking about pigeons and peacocks here… Well, AI solutions can be compared to these birds. The same principle applies: the real everyday magic often lies in the simple, practical yet impactful tools that make a meaningful difference in our daily work. In a sea of big, disruptive peacock solutions, there’s immense value to be found in small, useful pigeons that add incremental value, which adds up to a lot of impact. 

There is loads of big, disruptive experimentation with AI in insight going on right now, tools that have potential to completely upend or transform our working practices, massively speeding up interviewing through AI interviewing, creating entirely synthetic data sets and so on. They’re somewhat experimental, revolutionary and often require decent investment (in time and/or money) to fully implement into your ways of working. These are my AI for insight peacocks. We need to nurture them but we shouldn’t be entirely distracted by their dazzling nature. The tools I’m most evangelical about right now aren’t always flashy. They’re often the pigeons of the AI world tools that assist people in doing smaller, everyday things, brilliantly, and are quietly transforming our ways of working and insight generation. Here are three examples: 

Example 1: Copilot for meeting notes

Copilot writes up notes from my meetings, saving me the time and hassle of scrabbling for lost notes. Instead of spending hours reconstructing conversations, I can focus on my job. A more efficient me emerges! 

Example 2: “Find me” tools 

We use a few “Find me” tools, including the search and retrieval feature in our strat7GPT platform which blends generative AI, with document upload and our own LLM, in a secure environment to power our consultants; on the whole, strat7GPT is actually more of a peacock game-changing solution, but which contains some small pigeon-y functionality too! Instead of searching through 40 transcripts for that specific quote about Pedro Pascal (still waiting for this to happen, by the way), I can find it in seconds. Simple and time-saving. 

 

Example 3: AI survey chatbot 

Our AI survey chatbot pops up in surveys and asks smart questions in response to verbatim answers. It’s not flashy (in fact if pops up very discreetly) but it’s incredibly effective. Let me break it down: 

  1. Addresses a known problem: the chatbot gets more insight from open-ended survey responses. With budgets for qualitative research being cut and increasing pressure on surveys to deliver all the answers, this is a biggie for us and our clients. 
  2. Easy to use: there’s no complex training required. Our scripters can drop it into surveys using a simple API (in the spirit of minimal jargon – this is a little piece of code that talks to the external AI but from a UX point of view, you get to stay within the survey you’re in). Adoption has been seamless because it’s intuitive. 
  3. Improves user experience: participants find it engaging and can opt out if they don’t want to interact. The chatbot asks genuinely good, curious questions thanks to neurosymbolic AI. Read more here. 
  4. Unlocks new insights: participants engage more deeply with their answers, providing richer feedback that can uncover entirely new insights. These are the kinds of breakthroughs that can transform simple tools into game-changers for researchers and clients alike – a true example of a pigeon turning into a peacock. 
  5. Easy to explain: if I can’t sum up a tool’s functionality in one sentence, in terms that anyone could understand, whether that’s a client or a graduate colleague, then I know it’s going to be harder to sell in and adopt. This chatbot’s value is simple – it helps us get deeper insights from surveys. 

Why pigeons matter

These kind of tools are simple… incrementally yet undoubtedly innovative, just in a subtle rather than screamy and headline-grabbing sense. They meet real needs, improve processes, and make our lives easier.  

So, let’s not forget the pigeons. They’re the AI tools quietly helping us work smarter, not harder. And in a world obsessed with peacocks, that’s worth celebrating. 

 

Author

Sarah Askew

Innovation Director

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