Using Bing AI to research clients, jobs and other work-related topics

For the type of spreadsheet work I do, it’s hard to figure out how to use ChatGPT or maybe Bing AI in a way I can get the most use out of it. The last time that I checked, and that was a while ago so I might have to revisit, ChatGPT was useful for easy Excel questions but for the more difficult stuff that I sometimes do, it was not much use. Someone sent me an article that noted that those in finance are still safe…for now.

As a matter of fact, a news article reported research results where the use of AI in customer service really improved the productivity of the work for those considered lower level or new, but for the experienced or the masters, AI did not have much impact on their productivity. And that kind of result may be why I’m not able to find much use out of ChatGPT or Bing AI.

But I still want to play around with them, just to get familiar with the potential.

So, I have come up with an idea of how I can play around with AI.

Some Approaches in Using AI

Right now, all of these ideas are centered around using LinkedIn and I’m in the testing phase, so I might be doing stuff that LinkedIn can already do.

The reason why I chose LinkedIn because I didn’t want to do the usual write me a song or poem, or write the typical cover letter, blah, blah blah. I wanted something meaty. Those other stuff, everybody is doing.

But for use in job search or searching for clients, there may be some new approaches that I can use.

I’m using Bing AI because of its capability to search the web and more importantly, the ability to summarize the results on the web page. What initiated this research and testing was when I did a throwaway question: can you give me a list of my potential competitors in the field of finance or FP&A and Bing went gallivanting across the internet to LinkedIn. It didn’t give me much, but bells rang in my head.

One thing to keep in mind, the AI sometimes give bad information, but I think that on the whole, it is more right than wrong. If you just keep in mind that you are looking for the gist of the trends or the overview of the thing, rather than being accurate in all details, then you will be okay. You will have to do research on some of the details.

1. Branding in LinkedIn

The first curiosity was “how does a machine view my profile in terms of my potential”? I wanted to see how I look to a machine, and maybe to a person, when viewing my profile. This is kind of a branding exercise.

The questions I posed were:

1. What are the top 10 skills you see in the profile?
2. What skills are missing from the profile for the role of XXX? What does this person need to work on?
3. If he/she had to sell himself/herself, what would be their differentiators?
4. Looking to the future, what skills will he/she need to build in order to stay ahead of the curve?

I’ve also been applying these questions to others that I might want to connect with or those who ask to connect with me, and results have been interesting. So far, at least in the field of finance or FP&A, if you have a profile that looks like everyone else, the Bing AI might say it couldn’t find any differentiators. On quite a few bland profiles, meaning they all look pretty much the same, Bing came back with no differentiators. There were only two profiles that Bing offered differentiators. On my profile, it gave me 2 differentiators and they were very interesting.

I did get some rather interesting results when testing these questions. With one lady, on the top 10 skills question, Bing offered to provide details to back up its assessment. I asked it to go ahead, and it came back with the supporting details, which for the most part made sense. But there was one item that I couldn’t map back to the profile. Bing mentioned a divestiture experience she had with selling a subsidiary to a private equity firm, but that particular item was nowhere on her profile. I even copied the profile to Word to do a search and still couldn’t find.

Then I went out to Google to see if that subsidiary even existed. Yep, it was a real company that was sold by her company to a private equity firm during the timeframe Bing mentioned. It took a bit of searching and diving into some of the links, but everything jived. But why did Bing go out to the web and pull it in? It didn’t need to.

I have two theories: 1) Bing was being creative (it was on creative mode) and thus just went out and did a search and luckily found something that meshes with the information on her profile; or 2) (this one I can relate, being someone who likes to play around with data and track and analyze things) LinkedIn and Microsoft, being engineering/software firms, like to deal with data and any deleted data is data, so instead of deleting the data for good, the company just made the data invisible but it is still retained somewhere in the bowels of the servers. The Bing AI, not knowing the difference, found it and divulged it.

I don’t know if #2 is true (or even #1) but it kind of makes sense. It’s a real possibility.

I’m going to continue playing around with these questions to see what else comes up and to really solidify my understanding of Bing.

2 Mapping my accomplishments to my profile.

This one is more of a test, and I haven’t done it yet. I want to test its insight on me in #1 and I thought doing a complete and detailed accomplishment stories might be the way to test the answers for me on #1. I have to find my list and maybe write some more accomplishments.

I’m going to use this website but with no links to the accomplishment page to test Bing, in other words that accomplishment page should be inaccessible to outsiders. I will compare that test with what I got from its analysis of my LinkedIn profile. It will be a good way to see if I missed something or overstated something. I’m most curious about my differentiator, which was the whole impetus to this inquiry.

The reason why I’m thinking of using my website rather than copying and posting my accomplishments into Bing’s comment box, is because my accomplishments may exceed the characters limitation of the Bing box. I would like the AI to have a bird’s eye view of my accomplishments before doing the analysis.

The other way in case one does not have a website, is to create a html file with Notepad. You don’t need much but you do need know basic html to get the page up. Once you have the file, you can drag and drop the file to the Microsoft Edge tab and up it will pop as a page.

I had hoped to be able to do it with a text file, but my test did not work. I will have to try again because this route may be the easiest.

3 Gathering the interests or pain points of potential hiring manager or interviewer.

This one has mixed results so I will continue testing. Sometimes it works and sometimes Bing just goes out to the web instead and find surprising stuff that I don’t know what to think. I’m still hoping to wrestle it and get some use out of it.

I’m trying to see if I can gather any kind of information from their LinkedIn activity such as likes, comments or posting. There may be something interesting there, but Bing has been kind of iffy.

In addition, I’m hoping that at some point the AI can tell me the best way to approach a person based upon some perceived personality. Now, I may be asking too much out of the AI, but that is one of my ideas. Can it give me suggestions on approaches based upon the person’s activities?

4 Find unique job posting or common pain points.

This one is also kind of iffy. I just started this one and am not ready to declare I have some findings. The reason why I’m doing this is a lot of job postings for FP&A type jobs sound the same and stuck in the past. I want to find something more futuristic and I’m wondering if Bing can help out.

Sometimes you can get pages of job postings and I really don’t want to sift through all of those pages. It would be nice if Bing could sift out those that may interest me. I’m really at the beginning stage of this and really want to be further along on #1 and #2 before really diving into this one.

An idea I had was to see if there is a common pain point. Or maybe have the AI look at my profile and then consider some job postings. Now this one is kind of the realm of LinkedIn so LinkedIn may be better. I’m just trying to play with some ideas to see if I can make use of Bing.

5 Vague idea of testing my contacts list.

At present time, the idea is so vague that I don’t know what I will do. Like what am I looking for? I know when people tell me to go through their contact list, I’m just daunted because some people have a huge contact list. So that one I have to think about.

Wrap up

So that’s where I stand right now. Those are ideas I have in making productive use of AI. LinkedIn is like a database and sometimes it is hard to go through it so I’m hoping the AI can help me out here.