AI is most effective when information is well organized and structured where possible.

The benefits are clear:

• AI will understand the information better and give more ‘intelligent’ results

• The result can more often be used for interaction with your existing business systems, enhancing effectiveness

• Structured information is often more compact, making it cheaper to use.

Custom AI assistants are the way to go. Then you can create powerful assistants that understand and use your business’ context.

Your business context includes:

• Business information

• Business functionality

• Authentication and authorization

• Your business’ access to external resources

It started with the OpenAI models that are behind ChatGPT. Specialized AI models are becoming available and you want to have the flexibility to use them.

General models are there in different classes. You want to solve simple problems with simple, cheaper models. So choice of model must be at the level of the AI assistant.

Agentic AI is the ability to have AI assistants that can perform multiple steps in one go.

Simple agents are needed already, for example to implement Retrieval Augmented Generation. That is needed for anwering questions. First you need to interpret the question, then retrieve information bits that have to do with that question, and then use that information to answer the question.

The future is agentic, which means that assistants will support more advanced scenarios that involve more intelligent steps.