Asking AI A Rambling Question
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. On today’s show, we’re talking about linear thinking versus transformative thinking associated with an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. I’m going to give you a firsthand experience of learning how to use AI in a transformative way.
The task at hand was to review a 49-page legal agreement drafted by a high-priced law firm in New York City. The document was, frankly, challenging to read. It was full of indirection with many references. Sometimes, the definition section of the agreement would mention that the actual definition was in another paragraph elsewhere in the document. Reading this structure could mean jumping back and forth between sections, which can be exceedingly slow and tiring.
Additionally, the document made no less than 40 references to outside government regulations, including specific sections of federal and state tax codes. It would mean that for every external reference, a search would have to be conducted to find what that particular IRS code is all about. Imagine doing this 40 times throughout a 49-page document. The process is terribly tedious.
Consider the Independent Legal Counsel for the other party undertaking this work at $600 or $900 an hour. The cost to read and understand that agreement is mind-boggling. The next best thing could be to ask an AI tool like Chat GBT for the information you seek. This approach is essentially using an AI tool like a more focused search tool, leading to a productivity gain. You’re mimicking what a human would do, but doing it faster.
However, even this approach has its limits. In this particular case, you would be making around 40 separate requests of the AI tool and incorporating the results into the review process — an operation estimated to take nearly an hour and a half, almost half the time it would take if doing the search the old fashioned way using Google. A significant time saver, but still considerable work.
But there’s another even more potent approach. If the AI tool is given the entire agreement as an input and asked to create a document with links to all the external references, the AI tool can do the job in one go. In this case, the entire task was reduced to just four and a half minutes, with the output being a four-page document containing all links to the external references.
The truth is, humans are used to asking succinct questions. If you were to ask a person a rambling question, they’d likely ask you to get straight to the point. However, with an AI, you can ask a question that’s 49 pages long. You could request a human to scan a 49-page document and find every external reference, link every document to its external references, but they might struggle. An AI, on the other hand, would not be deterred by this tedious task.
The question arises — did the AI tool provide good references? The answer is a resounding yes! Most of the references used the online resources from the Law School at Cornell University. As a non-lawyer, I was pleased with the results, arguably better than if I had performed the task myself.
All credit goes to my team: Robbie Butler, who’s become a student of AI and how to use it most effectively, and Autumn, our assistant, who did the work. By combining the thinking of the three of us, we found a way to use the AI tool, not for a mere 20 or 50 percent gain in efficiency but around a 50 times improvement, simply by changing the way we asked our question.
We effectively used the AI tool as an agent to carry out the work. This is the AI’s power that requires different thinking on the part of the user to truly leverage its potential. As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day, go make some great things happen! We’ll talk to you again tomorrow.
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