Amelia Patel is chief of staff for Lacy Diversified Industries (LDI), the family office of the Lacy family in Indianapolis. She discusses how she is using artificial intelligence for tasks including advancing family education:
How do you use AI in your job?
I use AI every day, multiple times a day. It makes me more efficient. It makes me smarter. It unstops brainstorming jams. It is just a tool that I think has limitless opportunities.
Some specific examples of how I use it:
Business Plans
I have used it for business plans. ChatGPT can produce a business plan that has every section that’s needed. It can start giving you initial research with links to it to add as substantive content.
People Strategy
To start building a people strategy, I took Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and asked ChatGPT to apply it to the corporate world. I’ve been building and refining this model for a while now. It has led to a people strategy that is about ensuring that everyone that works at LDI and all of our operating companies earns a living wage, has access to high-quality health care, has clear job responsibilities, has a career track, is part of a team that uses transparent and open communication to enhance their work, and feels accountable for the work that they’re doing. This goes all the way up to the top of the pyramid: What does it mean to be thriving and using work as the lever to help support that? I have framed out the bones to a really solid people strategy with ChatGPT. Now it’s on me to go test that strategy and workshop it. But this is a pretty amazing start.
Family Education Curriculum
I’ve used it to create a curriculum or roadmap for what family education could look like from birth to death, and what the objectives would be for each stage of life, depending on the goal of the person. I mapped every unit holder by age and grouped them into age cohorts. I used ChatGPT to generate lists of key learning objectives for each age group depending on their goal. If we have a NextGen person who wants to become CEO of the family business, ChatGPT will help me refine my curriculum model so that I’ve got a curriculum for that person. That looks completely different from the curriculum for somebody in the next gen that wants to be a philanthropist or pursue an art career.
Then, I started unpacking those objectives: I went section by section and used the tool to generate suggested activities attached to each learning objective. These could be short or more involved. For the youngest age cohort, one activity might be story time focusing on the origins of the family business. An older group might do a real-world simulation where they navigate a complex business scenario. One of our unit holders, who recently graduated from college, has amazing coding skills and is building us a unit holder portal. This is the type of experiential learning we can plug into the curriculum.
I built the model so that when I enter different prompts, it can tailor the curriculum in a matter of seconds. I’m a teacher by trade, and people spend years building curriculums. In an afternoon of playing with the model, this tool incorporated research-based best practices woven in throughout deep diving on themes and aligning to standards.
Before, I could be staring at a blank piece of paper and thinking, ‘OK, I’ve got 23 different unit holders, 23 different dreams. How can I possibly make all 23 happy in one annual retreat?’ The answer was, I couldn’t. We’re realizing we need a more bespoke approach, and that’s where AI has been able to level up my game. It has provided a curriculum that is my foundation.
Family education is a very important aspect of my job, but it’s not the most urgent. I’m using AI as a way to expedite it.
How did you learn to use AI?
I learned by just being curious with the free version of ChatGPT. I read a couple of articles about prompt engineering, which were helpful.
The biggest mind shift for me was not necessarily figuring out what to feed into the model, but rather trying to understand the limitlessness of its capabilities. It’s not just, ‘Draft me an email.’ It’s, ‘I’m a lawyer and I need to send a letter with this tone, this communication style and these facts.’ It will draft you an email that that tone, and you can take that and say, ‘That’s a little too formal.’ I just played around with these things.
A lot of people on our team use it. We did lunch-and-learns to share best practices. Once we realized that the team was interested in this, we got our own private instance of ChatGPT. That’s when the world exploded for me.
I am able to drop in a board deck and say, ‘Produce minutes based on this template,’ and within three minutes I have board minutes. I’m able to drop in a Harvard Business Review article that’s 60 pages long and say, ‘Give me the main points.’
I am using it as a tool to advance my learning and my production in ways that I didn’t even think were possible six months ago.
What are some of the risks of using AI, and how did you address them?
One issue is the privacy of the data you feed into the AI. Having our own private instance of ChatGPT is really key.
You can start chains, or conversation threads, in ChatGPT, so I’ve got one called the Lacy Academy. It will pull content that I’ve given it from other sources in our private instance. It’s like our own interconnected system, and it’s really powerful.
For example, I was able to say, ‘We have our holiday party next week. Write speaking points for me.’ It pulled content from my other chains to create highlights of the work my team and I had done during the year.
Another concern about using AI is that it is not always accurate. It makes things up. My approach to this is similar to my approach to Wikipedia when it first came out: Maybe start there, but don’t use it to write your case. If you have no idea about a topic, you can get some quick information from ChatGPT to use as a starting point. But always check the facts it gives you. Don’t copy, paste and send blindly.
It’s a starting place, a support, a tool. It’s not doing my job for me.
How do you think AI will affect family office professionals in the future?
I have two views on this. Will AI take jobs? 100%. I wouldn’t even say that’s up for debate. There are artificial intelligence applications right now that will replace a lot of the very mundane, monotonous, task-heavy roles.
But will ChatGPT or a similar platform take jobs? I don’t think so. I think these platforms are going to make the people who know how to use them more desirable, and if you’re not using it, you’re going to be at a disadvantage. But there is always going to be a need for a human touch.
What advice do you have for people who want to get started with AI?
Try it, test it out, play around with things. Start small — use it in your personal life. You could ask it how to approach a difficult conversation with your child, or how to plan a 40th birthday party for your husband. You can start simple, and as you get more confident, you’ll be amazed at what it can do.
