One person enhanced with AI

If you’re a freelancer, working solo, taking external projects, or if you’re just an individual who is curious and wonders whether you can use AI in your life, this chapter is for you. The question is, how can you leverage AI as a single person in your life and your solo work, without engaging larger structures and organisations. Is that possible at all? The answer is yes.

One person startup

If you’ve read previous chapters, then you already know about maturity levels at organisations, startups powered by AI, and projects delivered faster. Now think about yourself as a startup. If you’re yourself a freelance writer, content creator, or a solo data scientist, you have a product or a service you provide (content, code, support). So first of all, AI can help you boost your effectiveness with all the tools mentioned in the previous chapter about startups:

• AI assistant for meetings,
• CRM or a smart spreadsheet for keeping track of your projects,
• smart newsletter,
• audience analysis.

AI can even help you take your hobby to another level. Say you’re into running or video games. You want to understand your best options when it comes to specific shoes or a particular genre of video games. Machine learning algorithms can personalize your recommendations. Algorithms that fuel Amazon or Netflix recommendations for you are available as a black box on commercial clouds of Google or Microsoft. All you have to do is choose a model you want to test and run it on your data. Initial setup might be a little complicated if you don’t have a technical background, but after a while, you’ll get used to it and will be able to use it by yourself. Hyperpersonalization is the way we will shop and make our choices.

A universal solution, which is less AI, more smart engineering, is offered by Zapier, which connects various services through their APIs. For example, Zapier allows you to connect your email with Google Spreadsheet to keep track of customer emails in one place and thus build for you a custom CRM in a couple of clicks. That kind of task can be engineered manually if you’re a coder yourself, but you can save time by using Zapier.

Using AI as an individual

Let’s get practical and zoom out for a moment. In general, Artificial Intelligence systems can help you:

• gather, organize and clean data;
• process data for useful insights;
• make predictions based on historical data;
• automate repetitive tasks;
• optimize computations and processes.

Think about yourself and your freelance work as a one-person organisation with a function to optimize (time, money, happiness). Then you can start dividing your job into smaller tasks like:

• outreach to customers through emails and social media;
• monitor social media, web services for particular information;
• extract information from news to attain your goal or know what’s going on;
• meetings and calls;
• working on a project, researching new ideas;
• marketing.

If you split your activities into buckets, then you can think about how AI can help you with reducing the amount of work in a particular bucket. You can start by asking yourself these questions:

• can outreach be semi-automated? Can you automatically get a list of potential clients and message them through a bot, only later taking over a conversation?
• can you monitor social media and news through AI-powered tool which gather various sources in one place and allows you to go through all new data quickly?
• can you use a platform to keep track of news coming in, analysing live what’s going on, what’s there to observe?
• can you organise your meetings and calls in a more optimal way, by reducing the amount of time spent on travels and waiting? Can you analyse how much time you need exactly for a good meeting?
• what are the core components of a product or service you provide? Can you automate some parts of it?
• can you use a marketing platform to gather all your marketing efforts in one place and monitor them from a single platform? Can you use AI suggestions to optimize your ad spend, analyze your customers, and grow your sales?

I have formulated all the above questions in the form of ‘can you’ because the answer is ‘yes, you can.’ For each of those points on the list, there’s a product or platform which can do it for you, automating and optimizing the process that you have to deal with daily.

Collect data

My final tip is similar to the one I gave for startups: collect as much data as possible and act upon it. Think about your freelance projects: who are your clients, where do they come from, what’s the usual pre-sale interaction, and so on. Ask questions and collect data to see what’s going on. Once you have enough of it and more than you can analyse yourself, start using tracking solutions: business analytics software, marketing tools, CRMs; they are all for you.

One person startup is still a startup.

It will be harder for you to deploy machine learning models at scale because you’ll probably have less data than established companies, but any automation will significantly boost your performance. Just think about installing a simple chatbot on your website to collect data about your potential customers, or use automated tools to analyse your invoices. You’ll be surprised by the results.

Starting early with AI is the best thing you can do. Implementing AI tools to your workflow is often more straightforward than you think, and it usually just takes courage to try something new. There are plenty of tools out there for your work because countless startups around the world try to innovate in every single business niche. So do your research, find relevant tools, and give them a try. Be open. If you have data to analyse and repetitive processes in your workflow, you can most likely use AI tools right now.