Beyond the Buzz: Leveraging AI in Cross-Functional Communication and Collaboration

OK, hello everyone. My name is Miranda, thanks for joining my talk today. The focus is how you can use AI tools for seamless collaboration across teams. But really, what does that exactly mean? That sounds quite jargony, doesn't it?

I wanted to talk today about how AI helps me with collaboration because that is one of those areas in my workday when I'm working with, say, engineers or legal teams, even those who are building out our emails, where I'll just start to break out in a cold sweat if I'm looking at this massive Slack conversation filled with jargon that I don't understand. And AI has honestly helped me become such a better collaborator with all different types of teams, with their different expertises and their different roles. It's been a lifesaver.

So really, we're helping, I'm going to be helping you feel not like this. So this is how I used to feel talking to my engineering team, you know, just going along, nodding, trying to convince them that I was really following along with them. But now with AI, this is how I feel. Jim is the AI and I remain Dwight. And I just feel so much more empowered, so much more confident to talk to not just engineers, but anyone where I'm feeling as though there's some sort of communication barrier between myself and them.

So what are we really going to do? I'll give a quick intro of who I am, who this talking head is in front of you, how I use AI on a daily basis, and my favourite tools. I'll walk you through them. And then at the very end, and actually maybe even throughout, I'll share with you, there's a QR code that you'll get. So you can just scan the screen, and you can see like a one pager version of everything that I'm talking about.

So here is the challenge, the big challenge that I think AI can help with. Understanding. So every team definitely has its own language. I'm sure you have felt this if you work remotely, and you can just jump into the different Slack channels where each team is talking, and you do a quick scroll through and you have like no idea what they're talking about. So in order to even start collaborating, you need to get to a foundation where you actually understand what they're saying. And this isn't just, you know, from me to engineers of looking at what they're saying, you know, API limitations and latency, and I don't know, all this horrible jargon that I had no clue what it meant. Marketers also have their own jargon. And so that could be things like funnels and nurture campaigns and retention rates. Sometimes I take for granted the own jargon slips into my language when I'm talking to colleagues on other teams. So truly, AI is a beautiful translator between any different type of team that you're working on. And I'm going to share my go to chat GPT prompts that helps translate input that I'm getting and then translate the output that I'm giving back to my colleagues.

Marketers also have their own jargon. And so that could be things like funnels and nurture campaigns and retention rates. Sometimes I take for granted the own jargon slips into my language when I'm talking to colleagues on other teams. So truly, AI is a beautiful translator between any different type of team that you're working on. And I'm going to share my go-to chat GPT prompts that helps translate input that I'm getting and then translate the output that I'm giving back to my colleagues.

The next one here, once you have that down, is communication. Now I'm actually going to approach this from how I communicate literally with my browser, thanks to the Arc browser, it's an AI-powered browser that I'm just absolutely obsessed with now, has built-in LLM, so page summarizers, and it's been a really helpful tool to just get exactly what I need way faster than I have before. And then the last one is taking both of those steps before it, how do I use AI then to effectively track tasks that I should be completing and following up with teams in ways that make sense for all of us.

Now the key to these is that you can iterate as you go. But if you scan the computer screen in front of you right now, this is where you can just pull up the notion page that I've created. So it has the prompt right there for you. You don't need to be like taking a screenshot of the next page or anything. And it also has a zap workflow template. So you can just copy that right into your Zapier account and it'll do exactly what I'm walking you through next.

This prompt is all about taking a really long technical scary thread and making it feel a lot more concise and clear. Prompts with chat GPT are a tricky thing. You need to be a balance. I found a balance of really detailed, but also giving chat GPT enough flexibility to give you something back that is really helpful. And so after much troubleshooting, this is something that I can now use reliably every time to essentially I use a Slack emoji and I just react to a specific Slack thread. So chat GPT then uses this prompt and takes the entire thread and pumps out exactly what I'm asking it to do here, which is giving me a key summary of the issues, any of the important terms that might be cropping up throughout that message. And then it suggests action items for me. Now chat GPT I've heard others say, you know, it's just like the best intern that you'll ever have.

So this prompt is all about taking a really long technical scary thread and making it feel a lot more concise and clear. Prompts with chat GPT are a tricky thing. You need to be a balance. I found a balance of really detailed, but also giving chat GPT enough flexibility to give you something back that is really helpful.

And so after much troubleshooting, this is something that I can now use reliably every time to essentially I use a Slack emoji and I just react to a specific Slack thread. So chat GPT then uses this prompt and takes the entire thread and pumps out exactly what I'm asking it to do here, which is giving me a key summary of the issues, any of the important terms that might be cropping up throughout that message. And then it suggests action items for me.

Now chat GPT I've heard others say, you know, it's just like the best intern that you'll ever have. And that's very much true. So sometimes this intern does mess up the specific action items that you should be taking, but I would give it a 85% success rate. Now the second prompt that I use is once I have gotten a summary of this big, long Slack thread, I'll take the output where it's like, okay, this is what your engineering team is talking about. This is what we suggest you should do. I'll brain dump my own reply.

And then I just use this prompt. So I say, okay, take everything that I just drafted for you and now revise it in this way. And the beauty of this is that you can save this as a custom GPT. So what that means, and you'll see it in the notion page, is that you can be mid conversation with chat GPT, and you can just call up either of these prompts by clicking, you know, the at symbol and whatever you named the prompt, then any of the future messages that you send, it's going to be fed through this specific prompt. So often I'll have a conversation going and I'll talk to my one, I call it the Slack thread buddy to refine the message that I'm going to send back to the team. And then when I need to translate something that's incoming, I'll use another term. And it's just like having two different types of friends jump into a conversation with you.

Okay, let's look at an example. Let's say I get this message from engineering team. You know, my manager says, Hey, Miranda, can you take a look at this thread? I think we need to do something here, but I'm not exactly sure what. I say, absolutely. I can. And it says, yeah, hey, team, just an update on the integration rate limiting. We're implementing token based quotas for API requests capped at a hundred requests per user per minute to mitigate latency during peak hours. I'm not even going to finish reading that because that is me the whole time I'm reading this thread. But now I can just go to Chachi Petit, I can pretty much just paste in the entire conversation. I have a black cat coming my way soon.

And this is what it would give me back. So I fed in that sample conversation and I then get, okay, the key issues here, Miranda, that you should know about new rate limits on API requests. Yada, yada. I'm not going to go into it. And then it shows me the suggested action items. And yeah, you can see the suggested action items are totally on point. So now let's say I go back to Chachi Petit and I draft a message based on the action items that I just got from prompt one. This is what prompt two gives me. Says, okay, next steps, let's get feedback on the draft from both marketing and product. Are there any other support resources that I could prepare or that we could prepare for product and support? Can you help verify which partners this would affect? All of this makes it so much quicker. So that's how I use Chachi Petit, my two powerhouse prompts. Scan this QR code, try them out for yourself. You can see the prompts there, save them as a custom GPT. What I highly recommend you do is tweak the custom GPT so that it's specific to your role. And you can also upload files into that custom GPT with a glossary of the terms that you're most familiar with that within your own role.

Okay. The next one is Arc. And it's, yes, it's a browser. And so I was like, should I be including an AI browser on this theme of how to communicate and collaborate quicker and more easily with other teams? And I landed on yes, because I am such a huge fan of Arc. It's the fastest way that I found to go to another partner's site and essentially summarize exactly what I need right on the page. I haven't found, and people can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure they will, but I haven't found a really great Chrome extension to do this.

And sometimes Chachi Petit, I don't know, it seems to sometimes pull up the right information and sometimes not. For whatever reason, Arc is just hitting it more successfully. So I'll often use this to simplify a long case study or a long partner developer doc for me right on the page. I can even ask it to start to draft headlines that I could then use in emails to zap your users about, say, the MetaConversions API. What I also love is it's kind of like your browser is a virtual friend, because all of the tabs along the side, this handy little tidy icon, it then uses AI to intelligently organize them. So this makes communicating with your colleagues faster because you're not going through every last one of your tabs to pull up something that you've been working on. I do think even it's because along the side tab there, because all of the browser tabs are on the side, you get more real estate to see what each tab is about instead of like when I used Chrome and, you know, within three hours into my workday, there's just 20, no, like 30 tiny icons and you have no idea what each of them are. So this sidebar you can just trigger with command S and it comes out or it collapses really easily. And then the split pane view, I also love. That's not so much an AI feature, but I think it's really great. You just drag and drop all of your tabs onto themselves and then it'll turn into a split screen for you.

Now, last but certainly not least, collaboration. So both of these are essentially Zapier workflows that I use every hour at work. And so one of them gives me like a one-click summary of whatever conversation I'm looking at and one of them gives me a one-click action item. And I go about this in a couple different ways. So I thought I would share both with you. Now, the first one, let's say you get a message from a team member, perhaps similar to the one we saw earlier. If you go to all of the options for how you can react to a message, what I'll do with one of these workflows is I have a little custom emoji that I uploaded into Slack and it's just the Asana symbol plus a little check sign. That then takes, similar to the first kind of way that I use ChachiPT, it takes how I use ChachiPT and puts it into a workflow. So I'll react. It looks at the whole Slack thread. It distills it into the key issues and the key action items. And then it feeds it into Asana for me. The other thing that I'll do though is sometimes a message comes up, there's no action item necessarily associated with it, but I want to be able to save it for later because it's important reading and so my go-to note taker is actually Reflect.

And so I'll feed in Reflect into, I'll feed in the message into Reflect and it does something similar for me where it takes, it has more space to take the summary of what I've been looking at and any action items. So what this looks like as an example would be if I react to a message, all of this that you see was AI generated. So it looks at the entire thread. It gives me a summary and it gives me two action items. So that's the one that I would be reacting to if it was like, okay, this is something that I want to complete but I don't need my team necessarily to have visibility into it. And then the other type that I could do is nested under relevant reading. And that's something where there might not be an action item, but it does a little bit more of a thorough job of outlining exactly what that discussion is about.