Is This The Future? Exploring Sana's AI Assistant For Work

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Today’s Thoughts ☠️

Ahoy there 👋,

I’m trying something a little different this week.

No, that’s not giving up drinking copious amounts of tea while writing this.

I’m often asked “What’s the best tool for x?” My answer is usually - it depends. I get that’s not always helpful but I need more context. Instead of me trying to answer this 1:1, what if I can kill two birds with one stone (sorry birds, couldn’t think of a better analogy right now)?

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at reviewing useful tech for L&D.

Today’s edition is my first attempt at this. The kind folks at Sana gave me early access to their new conversational AI assistant which I’ve been using for a few months now.

Today, I’m sharing my experience so far and if it’s worth your time as a potential tech solution for work.

[Note: While Sana do sponsor this newsletter from time to time. I’m not paid to review their or anyone else’s products. These are my own thoughts on a free to access tool. The choice to use this or any other tool I talk about is yours alone.]

Get your tea or beverage of choice ready, 🍵.

We've got lots to discuss!

In today’s chat👇

• 🤔 Is This The Future? Exploring Sana’s AI assistant for work

• 😴 More sleep is great for learning and flushing junk out of your mind

TOGETHER WITH SANA

Try Sana’s New AI Assistant For Free!

Sana has just launched a free version of its latest product, Sana AI.

It’s a knowledge assistant that helps you work smarter and faster.

You can use it to enhance many tasks, including:

• Document analyses

• Research and report creation

• Automatic summarisations from your meetings.

The best part is it connects directly into your company’s knowledge. No more endlessly searching Sharepoint sites for valuable knowledge with this by your side.

THE BIG THOUGHT
Is This The Future? Exploring Sana’s AI assistant for work

The good folks at Sana let me loose on their new AI assistant.

Sana AI is the company’s second product alongside its AI-first learning platform. You can use it for free or get a paid-for version for work.

Here’s what happened:

4 things I like:

1. Customisable AI assistant profiles

2. Refine your search and data sources

3. In-built prompt library

4. External integrations

Customisable AI assistant profiles

This is way more important than you probably think it is.

For ChatGPT users, you might be familiar with its ‘custom instructions’ feature. This tailors what the conversational AI knows about you and how it responds. It’s very useful.

Imagine this on steroids with Sana’s customisable AI assistant profiles.

You get to personalise everything from:

1. Assistant name

2. It’s personality

3. How it responds

4. The creativity level of its response

5. Internet connection

Most conversational tools, including the big names we all know, don’t give you direct access to control the creativity of an assistant's output. This is important as it greatly influences the accuracy of responses.

Most people don’t know the difference between probabilistic and deterministic systems.

Generative AI technology is probabilistic which means its basically one big probability engine. No matter what tool you use, it will hallucinate and make up stuff from time to time. The benefit of getting direct access to its creativity temperature helps to mitigate this.

It won’t stop it entirely but it will help navigate the BS.

Think of it as a temperature gauge 🌡️.

The lower the temperature the more accurate your responses will be, and the higher the temperature the more creative. They both have places in your workflow.

In sum: Direct access to this is surprising but incredibly useful.

Refine your search and data sources

Searching with many AI assistants can be tricky.

Outside of Perplexity, not many offer you the option to refine your search to a particular source. Lucky, Sana’s team has this built-in.

You might think “What’s so great about this?”. 

My one word answer to that question - ‘Specificity’

Most conversational AI tools work on using data from two sources:

1. It’s training database

2. The internet

Of course, you can use tools to use a 3rd source of your own PDF or other data files. But, you must continuously tell the tool to not use data from the other 2 sources when answering. Sadly, it doesn’t always workout that way.

For the fellow AI nerds amongst you, this is called “Fine-tuning”.

It enables you to provide your own data and now it won’t be sent back to Sana to use to train its own model.

A bonus to this is the ability to upload and converse with your own docs. 

As a tool that connects together all your company's knowledge this sounds like a no-brainer, but not every tool offers this.

Imagine uploading your company’s latest financial report into your assistant, knowing you're not going to leak any data, and asking, “What the hell do all these numbers mean?”.

Make sure to watch the review video where I take you through an example of this.

In-built prompt library

Despite what social media might tell you, prompts are not magical.

Neither are they some form of cryptic language that only nerds understand. The reality is a lot simpler - they’re words we use to instruct a tool on what to do.

I call it talking to machines. Most humans call it conversations.

This is what many misunderstand when working with AI assistants. It’s not Google. You don’t input a bunch of keywords to review a listicle of articles that may or may not contain the info you want.

For these tools, it’s all about the conversation.

Structured writing and clear thinking will take you a long way in unlocking any conversational AI’s capabilities.

That's what prompts do.

They summarise what you need the assistant to know and do. They’re a personalised instruction.

However, there is no perfect prompt.

If you only send one prompt and then give up, you’re losing out. Research shows that a conversation of at least 8 prompts is the sweet spot for reaching a good output.

Despite not having ‘one prompt to rule them all’. Knowing which prompts can work best in a conversation saves time and a lot of experimentation for others.

Enter the prompt library.

At this moment, many people I know do at least one of these 4 things to build a prompt:

1. Ask Google

2. Use something a 19-year old put on Twitter

3. Ask a friend

4. Ask ChatGPT (funny that)

You’d think they’d save whatever works for them.

Most don’t!

You can change that with a prompt library. A lot of teams I work with store these in Google Docs, Notion or buried somewhere in Microsoft Teams.

The better solution is an in-built library sharing all of your company's top-performing prompts for specific tasks in the place you actually need them - the tool.

Thankfully, Sana knows this too.

I found myself going through the templates section more than I originally imagined. Partly for inspiration and partly out of curiosity. It only took me 20 minutes to find its value. Prompt templates on command felt like some superpower reserved for those Marvel films.

I was certainly enjoying my all-powerful moments of ‘fill in the prompts’ with my specific context. The best bit? I never had to leave my screen to rummage for them elsewhere.

Integrations out of the box

What most AI assistants lack right now is simple to use integrations.

Yes, you can do them. But no it’s not easy to do. Like many things in life you could say.

I was pleasantly surprised at the selection of integrations available from the get-go. Again, you might think “Why is this important?”. If we imagine that you sit in a typical mid-sized organisation. You’re no doubt overloaded with hundreds of apps that don’t talk to each other.

These integrations truly allow you to bring knowledge across your company into one place.

Which means you can talk to and analyse any piece of content in your company in seconds. A pretty cool time-saver if you ask me.

Is it right for you?

If you answer yes to any of these:

• Surface company knowledge all in one place

• Find answers to niche company questions

• Work smarter with speed and quality 

Then this could be for you.

There’s a lot of LLMs for work on the market. ChatGPT from Open AI and Microsoft Co-pilot are a few you might already know.

On the free to use for personal tasks front, theirs plenty of powerful models out there from the big names listed too. Yet, specifically for work, Sana AI can be a strong contender.

Side note: Never use a unapproved non-enterprise tool for work tasks!

→ Be smart in what you do.

If you’re just looking for a tool to say “We’re using AI at x” then it isn’t for you.

This is the next wave of performance for work in my opinion. LLMs are not a L&D tool alone, they’re a workforce support tool.

What you get

I stole this from Sana’s website:

Sana AI [Free plan]

• LLM access with web search

• Unlimited assistants and prompt templates

• Integrations with Sharepoint, Google Drive, Outlook and Google Calendars, including meeting recordings for Google Meet, Teams, and Zoom, and web search

• Credit system for queries and meeting usage

Sana AI Enterprise comes with custom pricing, offering everything above, plus:

• Unlimited documents, queries, and recordings

• Enterprise-grade security and privacy

• Selection of leading LLMs, including those by Azure, Anthropic, Cohere and OpenAI, plus self-hosted models

• Domain verification and SAML-based SSO, and SCIM

Final Thoughts

As I always say, tech should enhance your work, not replace it.

These are my initial thoughts. I recommend you experiment with the free version and compare this to the current crop of LLMs (ChatGPT etc) to form your own too.

With any purchase be clear on the problem you’re trying to solve. Bad decisions come from knee-jerk reactions with market-expectations.

Till next time.

SMART THOUGHTS

Stuff that caught my eye this week.

🤔  More sleep is great for learning and flushing junk out of your mind

Sleep is our best natural performance enhancing drug, imo.

I’m not sure you can even call it a drug if we naturally create it? Anyway, sleep is good for lots of things.

You can read the full scientific version here. The TL;DR is the more sleep you get the more time your brain has to get rid of the nasty stuff that could prevent brain based diseases.

In sum: Better and more sleep = improved learning, health and more.

💡 DropBox CEO: Managers mandating RTO are creating toxic relationships and wishing for 2019

Return to office mandates are spiking right now.

A number of companies (like Nike) are claiming remote work is hurting ‘innovation’. While others are saying this is simply an excuse to cover up bad working practices.

This article with Dropbox CEO, Drew Houston made a lot of sense to me.

Noe we know it can work and build flexibility into our lives. Are we going to let companies tell us we can’t have it?

🔥  How to navigate negativity bias

On doom-scrolling trips through social media I’m very aware of the mass emotional outpour.

That emotion is almost 90% negative.

It’s weird that we’ve designed systems to mass elevate our personal feelings into a whirlwind of an endless scroll. Yet, that’s how big tech makes most of its money.

Research says we:

• Remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones.

• Recall insults better than praise.

• React more strongly to negative stimuli.

• Think about negative things more frequently than positive ones.

• Respond more strongly to negative events than to equally positive ones.

So how do we change this? Here’s a few tools and tactics.

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