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Post 3 of 5 \u2014 There are two kinds of AI. We are teaching our team both.<\/em><\/p>\n So far we\u2019ve talked about how our work is changing and how we\u2019re adapting\u2014now let\u2019s talk about how we actually use AI.<\/p>\n Most people I talk to think of AI as one thing. It is not. There are two distinct flavors of AI my team is learning to work with, and the difference matters for the quality of the work you receive from us. I want to take a few minutes to explain both, because the distinction is genuinely useful, and most other professional advisors in your world have not articulated it yet.<\/p>\n This is the AI most people have heard of. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. You give it context and direction, and it generates something like a draft analysis, a memo, a structured comparison, a research summary.<\/p>\n The catch is that the quality of what it produces depends almost entirely on the quality of how you set up the conversation. Garbage in, confidently wrong garbage out. So we have trained the team on five principles for working with generative AI well:<\/p>\n These five principles are part of what my team practices with Chad, the custom GPT I introduced in the last post. They are also why two firms using the same off-the-shelf AI tool can produce wildly different work. The tool is the same. The skill is not.<\/p>\n The second flavor is newer and, in some ways, more interesting for our daily work together. It is the AI that lives inside the software you and we already use. These tools do not generate. They understand. You ask them a natural-language question about your actual financial data, and they give you the answer because they have direct, secure access to it. No keyword search. No clicking through six menus to find the right report. No exporting to Excel and pivoting.<\/p>\n You can just ask: \u201cWhat did we pay this vendor over the last twelve months, and is that pattern unusual compared to similar vendors?\u201d And get an answer. And these questions are becoming more securely embedded in our financial tools online that we all use.<\/p>\n I sometimes describe the difference this way. Searching software the old way is like looking for one specific ingredient on a grocery store shelf. While talking to embedded semantic AI is like having a chef who knows the whole pantry walk you through what is possible to make a creative dish.<\/p>\nThe first kind: generative AI<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The second kind: semantic AI embedded in your software<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Why both matter to you<\/strong><\/h2>\n