This week we take a look at AI as a resource to solo entrepreneurs and small businesses. https://app.olympia.chat/ or Olympia (currently in Beta) is an AI staffing solution. ChatGPT is the AI engine, but Olympia creates individual AI personas for discrete, specialist tasks. Current specialists on their (your) staff are:
The interface is the standard prompt-based chat, but there's no doubt that when you feel you are messaging a "person" it becomes a more comfortable exercise. And that's the magic of Olympia: the specialist-specific staff encourage focused prompt development without really thinking to hard about it.
The first interaction is with Eleni Platoudi, the Customer Success Manager, who's role is to introduce the other specialists, and coordinate their responses. By initially providing Eleni with some basic inputs like your bio, website, company overview (any background on the business), you start to educate the whole team.
Each staffer then introduces themselves, their focus, and ways they can provide help. I started with Social Media Specialist, Melissa Chang, since my primary comms platofrm is LinkedIn. After asking a few question, Melissa suggested a twice-weekly cadence of LinkedIn posts on broad topics I suggested. The other nice thing about this system is that each persona "shares" information with the other 10, so there is no re-education and there's a natural coordination of plans, content, copy etc.
Now, as you know, AI has the ability to answer any question or write any content in seconds. But not so Olympia. Perhaps to make the interface seem more "real" and human-like, the specialists ask you to leave it with them and that they will come back to you with a plan. I waited a day and...nothing. I then sent a message to Melissa asking how she was doing with the plan, to which she immediately responded and provided the first draft. I think the intention here is to do two things:
1) As mentioned, make it feel more real and interactive, even going as far as having to check-in and "remind" a direct report on a task!
2) Provide input in a contextually timely way. In other words, had Melissa sent me the plan an hour after I gave the prompt I might have been in the middle of something else, and there's a good chance I would move on and miss the response. By having me circle back but immediately get the plan, Olympia is ensuring that I am ready to receive the information. Smart.
My overall assessment is that Olympia is a clever concept that is still too Beta/early to be of a lot of value, yet. The planning items are fairly broad-strokes, generic, and a little too basic for a seasoned marketer. But to be fair, if your business was outside of the marketing industry it might be a helpful grounding. Conversely the copy development is very quirky and clearly AI-developed. I plan on trying the Copywriter and Copy Editor to see if they can solve for this, but the initial concepts need a ton of work.
For now I will probably continue to use ChatGPT and its less user-friendly interface, but I look forward to seeing how the Olympia Beta develops.