"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

- George Bernard Shaw

A lot of people get frustrated with generative AI. They have high expectations. They think they’ll get amazing results immediately, but don’t. They think they've clearly asked it for something, they think they've communicated effectively enough with the machine, but in reality they haven't.

Maybe they’ve been given access to a co-pilot but all it does is reference the wrong material so instead of saving time, it burns it.  Maybe they go direct and ask ChatGPT a few questions but what they get back is lacklustre. They think they’ve communicated the ask but they have not. And that’s not their fault – it usually comes down to structure.

KNOWLEDGE & STRUCTURE

Knowledge & how it's structured is one of the most critical & overlooked concepts when it comes to generative AI. And we're not just talking about prompts here, even though the only way normal people tend to talk about structure in Generative AI is in relation to prompting. 

Thousands of grifters are taking advantage of our desire for instant AI gratification – selling sheets of prompts online – basically PDFs – detailing prompt structures to help you write a better email or pitch deck, or even to get ChatGPT act as your life coach. They're trying to push you, the AI user, to think about structuring what you put into the AI platform to get a good result. While selling pdfs is shady and archaic and weird, structuring your ask is still a really important concept to get your head around. 

If you don’t structure a prompt well you won’t get a good output from AI. The email you want to write won’t sound like you, the pitch deck will appear generic and undifferentiated. But the prompt is only one part. The bigger part is the knowledge that backs it up. A structured prompt is a good first step. But if you give the AI model structured context with which to frame the ask, that’s even more impactful. That’s where the power lies. You'd think everyone would be talking about this, but they're not.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff has been loudly dumping on Microsoft's co-pilot enterprise tool. He’s called Co-Pilot 'Clippy 2.0'. He has said that it’s been a disastrous rollout, and he's not wrong. There’s plenty of evidence from people who aren’t getting the value out of it or have massive security concerns – if you’ve used it, you may have experienced this. It’s not because the underlying AI doesn’t work (It does - we’ve built it into NOAN and it’s immensely powerful) but because of a lack of structured knowledge.

There is no tool that anyone can apply everywhere to do everything all at once successfully, but that’s how Gen AI is often being applied. 

Everything everywhere all at once is not a strategy. 

Everything everywhere all at once is the antithesis of structure. 

Everything everywhere all at once is the absence of focus. 

If AI is being asked to find cohesion or create & structure within thousands of contradictory documents and PDFs of different vintages, and then apply it rapidfire to everyone’s disparate desired outcomes, that is a recipe for organisational chaos and terrible content creation. 

DESIGNING FOR THE LAZIEST PERSON

Some of it comes from human laziness. People don’t want to put in the time (or simply don’t have the time) to learn prompting. They don’t want to have to put the time into learning to create structures both for the requests and for the data they put into AI. That's understandable. People are stressed and busy and just want to wave a magic little wand – like that purple magic icon you see everywhere for AI – and hope that their hoppers are filled with magical content without having any structure built. But that doesn’t happen, and it’s not the user’s fault – arguably it’s a failure of design.

You have to build nice comfortable structures to help people build their own useful structures, even if they don’t want to do that groundwork. One of our guiding principles at NOAN is that you have to make it easy. Your UX should create structure without the user feeling like they're doing that work. User laziness has to be assumed, and designed for.

Also: structure, no matter how many times we say the word, isn’t a panacea. You also need have an outcome to focus on. If your knowledge is structured and your prompts are well structured that’s great. If  your focus on a goal or an outcome is just as well thought through, then you’re in an even better place and more likely to succeed. If the tool you’re using structures knowledge specifically to usher you toward that specific outcome, then you’re in an even better position again.

THE AI SUCCESS EQUATION

So where are we going with all this? We land on this kind of equation:

Success with AI = Structured Knowledge + Structured Prompts + Clarity of Desired Outcome 

NOAN was designed for the outcome of building businesses. We are not in the business of summarizing your meetings. We are not in the business of being a notetaker. We are not in the business of reading all of your emails and your colleagues emails and giving you a digest. 

We are in the business of helping you as an entrepreneur focus on building a business. We are in the business of guiding you effortlessly through creating strategy and then making it simple to create the content you need to execute that strategy, piece by piece. Everything we build is designed to subtly create structures for AI that get you that outcome faster and more intelligently than ever before.

When you work with NOAN our UX and structured prompting (under the hood and out of sight) are helping you structure your thinking to build a business. When you create a prompt in NOAN to make content, NOAN is structuring the ask and using the knowledge we’ve already helped you structure to create something that really helps you build a business. Behind the scenes, NOAN is taking all of your inputs, structuring them for use in further prompts to serve your business intelligently.

Even as you pivot strategies and evolve your business in NOAN, that structured knowledge is dynamically updated and always ready to be called upon. Structure, structure, structure. But purring quietly away, effortlessly. Knowledge management without the management.

WHO WILL WIN?

We believe that the most valuable tools that will emerge from the AI revolution are focused and built around a clearly defined task or concept. 

Apps that spread themselves too thin will struggle to differentiate. 

Apps that don’t focus enough on helping users structure their inputs or the context on which they rely will struggle to deliver quality.

NOAN sits way upstream of a lot of apps, where we can help users structure their knowledge, build better strategy and therefore use AI more effectively to create the content that powers their business. That is why NOAN is so valuable and why NOAN will succeed.

To whom are we most valuable? To the 90% of businesses most often ignored, or told they need masses of data to start with AI. The ones being sold tools to deploy content that hasn’t been built on strategy, and to whom nobody’s selling a modern, AI-ready solution for building strategy. 

Small businesses and new businesses have an advantage in this world of structured inputs for AI. If you can build a business in an AI-first way thinking about that structure from the very beginning you’re in a much much cleaner starting position than if you’re asking AI to sort out a huge mess created by committees and boards and teams over decades. The closer you are to day zero, the less legacy mess you have to unpick, you can just build for the bright shiny new future.

And if you have a tool that creates that structure for you, that’s designed for the task you’re trying to tackle, you’re in a better position again. If you’re using NOAN you don’t really have to think that hard about the structure. We will build you an AI-first business together, and the more powerful NOAN gets the more powerful your business becomes. 

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

We called our company NOAN because we wanted to play on the word about what is known: what is known about your company, are there known knowns, or known unknowns, to play on that famous Donald Rumsfeld speech, and how well-known can you become. It’s a knowledge pun, a little wordplay. 

NOAN gets mispronounced or mistranscribed from time to time as No-Anne or Gnome or, most appropriately, KNOWN, but we like NOAN, because we believe what you know about your company and what AI knows about your company is critical to your success. So get NOAN, and get known, but in the meantime get knowing.