from JPT Group | March 2025 | Vol. 18 No. 3

Are You Struggling with AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to be one of the most impactful developments in history – perhaps since the invention of the printing press. Even now, in its embryonic stage of development, legions of people are turning to it in their everyday lives – even in their personal lives in addition to business and academia.
As with most any technological development, the major challenges surrounding AI involve getting the most out of it and understanding what it can and can’t do, and what its true capabilites are. This may be what leaves many people frustrated and scratching their heads.
Not long ago while listening to a panel discussion on AI, one of the panelists cut through the muck and stated the importance of presenting AI – any AI system from ChatGPT to Perplexity and beyond – with the absolute most descriptive prompt as the key to realizing its maximum power.

Are we having fun yet?
OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman recently told Inc. Magazine that the best way to learn to use AI is to play with it. Test it. Challenge it. Study how it responds. Examine what it tells you – and just as important, pay close attention to what it doesn’t tell you. Brockman added that when it comes to getting the maximum value from AI tools is learning how to talk to, or prompt them for the best results. That should speak volumes.
Brockman has narrowed it down to four main criteria:

State your goal. Your prompt should be precise and descriptive.
Specify your preferred format. Will you be satisfied with a simple list? Do you want any academic citations?
Warnings and guardrails. A common complaint about today’s AI is its ability to spew out unverifiable or unsubstantiated crap. Tell it to be like Sergeant Joe Friday, “Just the facts, maam.”
Context dump. This can be a sort of catch-all. If you’ve done your job with the first three, you can afford to be a little open-ended here.

Prompts that are too broad or too general will not deliver the results you seek. “What are the main points of the Gettysburg Address?” That’s all well and good, but books have been written on the topic. Chances are a prompt such as that will not present any breakthrough thoughts or anything especially provocative. Are you seeking political points, cultural points, impacts on the war and its combatants?
Think before you ask. It’s somewhat like being confronted with a genie who agrees to grant you one wish. You had better think it through and decide what you want and what’s important to you, or else you’re going to squander any chance you might have had for satisfaction.
Fortunately, with AI you can get a do-over. The genie won’t be that generous.

“When you call upon a thoroughbred, he gives you all the speed, strength of heart and sinew in him. When you call on a jackass, he kicks.”

— Patricia Neal, American actress

BUSINESS UPDATE

Moosehead Breweries Limited is Canada’s oldest independent brewery. Located in Saint John, New Brunswick, the brewery was founded in 1867 and is still privately owned and operated by the company’s founding family, the Oland family. The largest fully Canadian-owned brewer, the company is now in the sixth generation of family ownership and turns out 1,642 bottles of beer per minute. Moosehead sells its beer throughout Canada, the U.S. and in 15 countries around the world.

— Mustdocanada.com

More than Just Junk

Few things in this world are as simple as they appear, or as we would like them to be. Even our junk can be raised to new heights – including people. What used to be a garbage collector is now an environmental or sanitation engineer.

The law of the sea has its own terms and certainly its own jargon. “Flotsam and jetsam” is quite often a throw-away term for something as inane as “this and that.” Actually they have specific meanings when used off dry land.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in maritime law, flotsam and jetsam are terms for various types of property lost or abandoned at sea. Flotsam refers to goods from a sunken vessel that have floated to the surface, or any floating cargo that is cast overboard. Jetsam designates any cargo that is intentionally discarded from a ship or wreckage. (Think of the word: jettison.)

Now that that is cleared up, let’s interject the terms lagan and derelict. Lagan are goods cast overboard and heavy enough to sink to the ocean floor, but linked to a floating marker, such as a buoy or cork. Lagan can also be large objects trapped within the sinking vessel. Derelict can refer to goods that have sunk to the ocean floor, relinquished willingly or forcefully by its owner, and thus abandoned, but which no one has any hope of reclaiming.

"One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else."

- Timothy Morton, professor

KEEPERS

According to Webster’s Dictionary, the only word in the English language that begins with the letters “tm” is tmesis (pronounced tuh-me-sis – emphasis on the “me.”) A literary technique used for emphasis, the word dates back to 1586 and means a separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words. Some examples are: abso-blooming-lutely, fan-freaking-tastic, un-bloody-believable and whoop-de-freakin'-do.

Garbage in… Originally a brand of mobile garbage bins, dumpster is now used to describe any similar container.

— crossingsauthor.com

Hairy situation. Colombian police caught a man smuggling packets of cocaine under his toupee.

— Associated Press

Hair, hair, everywhere. Regrown hair is NOT thicker, coarser or darker. It just appears so.

— informationisbeautiful.net

Going Dutch? The smallest bar in Amsterdam, the Café De Dokter, has been owned by the same family since 1798.

— atlasobscura.com

That’s really really sick. In the U.S. 22.6 million employees planned to miss work the Monday after the Super Bowl – a 40 percent increase from last year.

— The Harris Poll

Work-related expense. Workers spend an average of $561 a month for in-person, in-the-office costs, including lunch, travel and childcare expenses.

— Forbes

Smoldering workers. About 82 percent of white-collar, desk-based knowledge workers in North America, Asia, and Europe reported being “slightly” to “extremely” burned out.

— HR Brew

Don’t toy with me. LEGO is an abbreviation of the Danish phrase “leg godt” which means “play well.”

— Mental Floss

Busy as a…? A Tanzanian man is reportedly married to 16 women, has more than 100 children, and 144 grandchildren.

— Oddity Central

Seasoned soldiers. Because they believed that it enhanced courage, strength and stamina, Roman soldiers typically ate garlic as a pre-battle routine.

— interestingfacts.com

They’re all noodles. There are about 350 recognized shapes of pasta.

— Favorite Things

Type Oh-my. Blood makes up about eight percent of your total body weight.

— Mental Floss

The Month of March

Month of the Month

March. St. Patrick’s Day. First day of spring. March Madness. Blah, blah, blah. What’s really important? Food, of course. It’s National Nutrition Month. And that means that March is the National Month for noodles, frozen food, caffeine awareness, peanuts and quinoa. But, be careful. It’s also Poison Prevention Awareness Month.

Today is March 15th. After enjoying National Corn Dog Day, you can wash it all down with National Tequila Day.

Question of the Month

Who was Wrong Way Corrigan and why the moniker? We will steer you to the right answer.

Quote of the Month

“Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.”

— Zig Zigler, American author, salesman and motivational speaker

Get a Headstart

If you have ever thought about including a newsletter in your marketing communications toolkit, before you begin, download our free digital booklet – Getting Started with Your Newsletter – to get some basic questions answered as well as a little inspiration to nudge you forward. Be sure to check out “Something Special” at the end. Download your copy.

A Gridiron MBA?
Maybe that’s not possible, but there is much you can learn about business from football in the book, Hard Hitting Lessons. The subtitle says it all, “Some not-so-obvious business lessons learned from playing football.”

Get your copy here!