Generative AI for the Curious Businessperson, Book 1

What Generative AI and Agentic Workflows Mean for Business, and What You’re Going to Do About That

Book 1 in an in-progress 3 book series covering generative AI with an eye towards the mid-market businessperson. In fact, the curious one. It’s in the title. This accessible guide cuts through buzzwords to explain everything from AI terminology to the impact on the job market to the nature of ‘intelligence’—and how that nature applies (or doesn’t) to your business challenges. No technical background required—just a desire to understand AI and how to do stuff with AI rather than just having AI done to them.

This isn’t a how-to manual as much as it is a why-to, what-to, and where-to manual. There’s plenty of prompting guides out there. You can even find instructions as to how to build up an agent that runs for you to do cool things. You can find ROI guides, and you can find “for dummies” guides (sigh). But, I think it’s important to understand your why. It’s important to understand a little bit (not too much) about how we got here, enough to contextualize what’s happening around us. So that we can avoid the “running around with our hair on fire” syndrome.

What You’ll Learn

The Democratization Journey: How technology has democratized knowledge (printing press), goods (industrial revolution), and now small-i intelligence (GenAI) – with agentic AI poised to democratize agency itself

Intelligence vs. intelligence: Understanding the crucial distinction between artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the “small-i intelligence” that current AI systems provide—pattern recognition and information processing capabilities rather than true consciousness or general reasoning

Jobs and AI Coexistence: By using two other massive transformations as a model (the printing press and the industrial revolution), we look at how each one had jobs that were “automated out” – but those were (more than) replaced by a need for people to do other work (making ink, paper; maintenance of machines), We discuss how “expert opinion” (including this book) is all over the map. But, learning more about AI is probably a good place to start to get prepared

The Automation Evolution: The progression from traditional automation to robotic process automation (RPA) to GenAI automation and finally to agentic AI systems

The SMART GEAR Framework: A comprehensive model for understanding agentic AI capabilities:

(Ok, it’s a little bit of a silly acronym, but I’m a marketing guy. I dream in acronyms.)

  • Synthesis: Combining information to create something new
  • Memory: Retaining experiences to inform future actions
  • Autonomy: Taking independent actions with minimal human oversight
  • Reflection: Self-evaluation and adjustment
  • Tool Calling: Utilizing external tools and APIs
  • Generation: Creating content like text, images, or code
  • Execution: Implementing ideas and carrying out tasks
  • Analysis: Finding patterns and insights in data
  • Reasoning: Using logic for informed decision-making

This book is optimized for businesspeople in mid-sized enterprises ($10-100 million), positioning you to leverage AI effectively. The subsequent volumes will cover implementation strategies and security considerations. Technical topics are covered with a light touch—giving you the information and the wording you need to understand and participate in conversations about these AI topics and how they affect your business. I mean, you’re not going to be slinging around the math behind gradient descent algorithms, but we concern ourselves with areas where the technology in the application touches the business. This book is about system-level and organization-level behaviors, not specific features.

And if you don’t like it, just tell me and I’ll give you back your money. No questions asked. I mean, I have to ask you if I have the right place to send your money back, and I might ask you what you don’t like about it, but you don’t have to answer that question – so we can say that it is “basically no questions asked.” It’s more like “I don’t care what the reason is – you may have tried to agenticize your cat, and it didn’t work. That’s fine. I mean, is the cat ok? Here’s your money, but I’d really appreciate knowing that your feline friend hasn’t suffered in the name of progress.”

It’s like that. But, I’m pretty sure you’re at least going to enjoy the ride.

Have fun! My contact info is in the book – drop me a line with any questions.