Hi everyone and welcome to NY Tech AI, where it is all about AI - AI Events, AI Insights, and the AI Ecosystem in NYC. If you know a friend or colleague, who might benefit too, please send it over. And with that, let’s begin.

What I cover today

• Upcoming AI Events in town

• AI News and Insights

• Community Updates

• And some Miscellaneous Stuff 😉 

📅 Upcoming AI Events in Town

Next Week:

• Wed, 8th Jan: Filmmaking with AI - Talk about all things filmmaking with AI - not Sora - and exchange best practice around technology (Kling, ..) and workflow improvements

• Wed, 8th Jan: Applying Machine Learning to Genetics - This will be rather detailed discussing a PhD paper on “a new model of computational genomics”

• Surprisingly little AI events in town… I’ll keep you posted 😉 

• Partially-AI ones I have in my calendar:

  • Tue, 7th Jan: Everything but SaaS - 😄 I love that, as almost everything else is about SaaS - join in and listen to a panel discussion on the future of industries outside of SaaS by partners of Union Square Ventures and South Park Commons

  • Wed, 8th Jan: Social Media Tech Walk - Tech Walk is a great institution here in NY and it’s a great format to connect to people, share experiences and learn from each other - at 9am in the morning ;)

  • Fri, 10th Jan: ‘fun house’ - #1 event for vc's, creators + tech founders by tappedX - this was initially a New Years Eve party, but got moved to the 10th due to too many registrations (700 going so far) and the name already says it - come if you are a creator and/or tech founder looking to connect with others in the space

The Week After:

• Tue, 14th Jan: Dating and Data science. What AI learned after 2,961 First Dates - well, come along and learn what AI has to say what women and men like and whether AI will arrange our marriages in 2025

• Tue, 14th Jan: AI/ML Conversations Meetup: TBD - The topic is not yet known, but come by if you want to have good conversations about AI and ML - more on the technical side

• Wed, 15th Jan: AI Meetup: GenAI, LLMs and ML - This is a technical meetup where you will learn and potentially also build how to use AI, topics to be announced

• Wed, 15th Jan: 3DNY - This meetup is for those interested in Architectural Visualization and Visual Effects and how technologies like AI, VR, the Metaverse and more effect and change the industry - a bit specific, but think about how you could use some of these visualizations for your content generation 😉 

• Tue, 14th Jan: SurrealDB January Meetup - This is for developers and those working with data, including Vector Search and Knowledge Graphs to build their AI applications. The meetup features two talks and networking

• Thu, 16th Jan: LECTURE: Technical Communication for Founders - That’s not so much about AI, but about the bridge of technical and non-technical communication and as it is super-important, also in AI development, I list here too

• Sat, 18th Jan: AI Agents for Faster Renewable Energy Projects - This is a two-day hackathon building products in the clean energy space, but if you are only in for the results and feedback - come Sunday 1pm - 3pm for pitching and networking

After That:

• Wed, 29th Jan: Empire State of AI: An Evening with Microsoft, .NET, and the Global AI Community - this is more of a technical evening on talks on AI, .NET and AI and AutoGen for AI Agents

• Wed, 5th Feb: Mindstone NY AI Meetup - Mindstone’s AI Meetups consist of 2-3 talks for mainly non-technical AI enthusiasts on how to use AI and setting up workflows and work with AI

💡 AI Highlights, Insights & Ideas

Nr. 1: AI allows you to go back to the basics

Tech tools are amazing as they improve workflows, save us time and make our work more effective. But within the current landscape, we see an overflow of tools popping up on each corner and industry every day.

My Linkedin stream is full of SDR AI Agents and the next big career tool to help me write my CV in such a way as to make my job applications more successful. It’s wonderful that we see this amount of innovation and development and I love it, as it allows us all to be more productive through the tools we use and the AI that democratizes our ability to bring those products to life.

And yet, many tools are simple copies of AI models like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini. A team connects an AI via an API, creates a beautifully looking front-end interface and sells it to a higher price for that specific use case.

For those tools, those simple tools, a bit of prompting may bring you to a much better solution than using one of the dozen tools out there on the market:

• Creating your AI-powered CV: Use Claude and Smart Prompting.*

• Creating your Pitch Deck Presentation: Use Claude and Smart Prompting.*

• Creating your Landing Page: Use Claude and Smart Prompting.*

• Creating your Logo and Branding Colors: Use Claude and Smart Prompting.*

I think, you get the gist. 😉 In those 4 cases, Claude or to some degree another AI model provides you with the same if not better results than using any other tool that costs you at least the same $20 that you pay with a professional AI solution. You are faster. And your results are often better.

And now to the Smart Prompting: In my experience, smart prompting means “precise iteration” → Tell the AI what you need and how you need it.

Here is an example for the case of your Pitch Deck.

Nr. 2: AI creates your pitchdeck in 30 min

You need a pitch deck fast and most of the other tools take too long, have boring designs or are tools that put constraints on you that keep you from being as flexible as you would like to be?

Then here is the solution. Use Claude and create yourself some nice 16:9 landscape SVG files - perfectly designed and smoothly structured:

Step 1: Tell Claude what you need

Hey. I want to create a 16:9 pitch deck presentation for my product "PitchFlow" for investors to showcase why they should invest $5 million into its development. Create the slides as SVG files. I want to have it in a rich, blue-purple colored design, headlines like those of McKinsey/BCG, a strong structure that sparks confidence, and no more than 5 slides. The content of the slides are .. 

The key here is to make that as specific as possible. Write down all the details that are important for your presentation. These can be placeholders for images, a time size of 3 specific types of slides, graphs etc.

Once you are done, review the resulting SVG files.

Step 2: Review & Make Improvements

It is unlikely that your first prompt leads to the perfect result. And likely also not the second. But over time, you will figure out what works best to use as prompts.

Here are some improvement prompts I often use with Claude while creating pitch deck, sales and QBR presentations:

• The text is too small in proportion to the design of the slides → tell AI to make it bigger

• The headlines are not as effective as you would like them to be → ask again

• The design is not as beautiful as you hoped → tell the Ai again what you want to have improved “richer” works rather good as a word here, as well as “smooth, modern, like those slides of companies like Google, Microsoft, ..”

Learning: Don’t expect AI to give you the perfect answer right away. Instead, let it create a first draft, and then start to iterate, 2x, 3x, and you are done.

Step 3: Create your final presentation

Once you are done, you may download your slides as SVG files. I personally prefer to quickly put them in Figma, make tiny adaptations in the design if needed, and then download them as PNG files or PDF. Online conversion tools or Canva work well.

One other reason, why I put them in Figma and the code in Notion is for automation purposes. The reason? See Nr. 3 below:

Nr. 3: First build your workflow manually, then automate

Connecting to people in the AI industry as with any other product in tech, I see that it is often better and more successful to understand what problem you are trying to solve before you are recreating an existing workflow before you automate that workflow before you use AI for your new workflow.

As AI is this new shiny tool and everyone loves to invest in AI and build a product with AI, we often forget to ask ourselves:

• What problem are we actually trying to solve here?

• And how should the new workflow, new process ideally look like?

Answering these questions is extremely helpful to understand first, before jumping in and automating a workflow with tech and AI.

Becuase what happens when you skip that step? You may just create an amazing product that no one is interested in, as it does not solve a real problem that is urgent enough for people to invest in your product.

Thus, first figure out what you want to improve, why you want to improve it, and then use AI and tech to automate it. And ask yourself: does it really need AI for that?

Coming back to Nr. 2 - Step 3 - that is the second reason why I use Figma + Notion to save my slides. Figma for the designs & Notion for the SVG Code.

Once I have done the process several times, I can build my own automation out of it.

This worked not because I used AI right from the start.

But it worked, because I first used and tested all possible Pitch Deck apps on the market.

While I did that I consistently pushed my head against the ceiling of possibilities until I ended up with Claude as my best option so far.

Now, the next one will be to automate that workflow.

And with that, we are back at Nr. 1 of the AI Insights:

The more you follow your way of improving the workflows you are using in your day-to-day, the more you realize that there are ways to improve your own workflows with AI. Once you do, you can automate them, and once you do that, you may as well bring your own product to market.

Till that point that someone else comes, and finds a better and faster way, and then the cycle repeats.

With AI that just works much faster than with other tech products.

Because nowadays everyone has access to a tool as powerful and human-similar as AI.

And with that, let’s see what AI will bring us in 2025!

🧠 AI Innovation Insights

Research Spotlight: AI's Impact on Investment Decision Inequality

A large-scale experimental study examining how generative AI affects financial decision-making reveals critical findings. Research shows:

• AI improves overall investment performance but benefits vary by user sophistication

• When AI summaries match user expertise level, performance improves 7% for less sophisticated investors and 18% for more sophisticated ones

• Misaligned AI summaries (too simple or complex for user level) can harm performance

• In portfolio allocation tasks, sophisticated investors saw 9.6% higher returns with AI versus 1.7% for less sophisticated investors

• Interactive AI chatbots amplified these gaps, with sophisticated users asking higher-quality questions and getting better responses

Key Takeaway: While AI makes financial information more accessible overall, it paradoxically widens rather than narrows the performance gap between sophisticated and novice investors. This challenges assumptions that AI democratizes financial markets. The research suggests AI's effectiveness depends heavily on matching its outputs to user expertise levels, and highlights how different user groups interact with and benefit from AI in fundamentally different ways.

✨ Miscellaneous Stuff

• Did you try DeepSeek? It’s a new AI model from China and free to use. It’s rather good for Social Media and explaining what it does instead of just providing answers

• Wanna be a supercool DJ? - Without DJing skills? - Check out Google’s MusicFX DJ. They have some other amazing tools for you to use free of charge - ImageFX, VideoFX, MusicFX, Notebook and more…

• Wanna learn about fun and helpful AI insights? Follow Ethan Mollick for papers (the one I summarized for you today), experiments and more

🚀 Community Highlights

• 520+ Members Strong! 

• Q1 2024 Events Preview: 

  • AI for Creators (Feb) - Sharing best practices in creating content with AI and helpful AI prompts for creators

  • Women for AI (Mar) - Bringing Women together to share best practices and learn from each other in the AI space

  • More coming soon!

🤝 Get Involved

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Your NY Tech AI Team

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