Discover how effective preparation can transform your AI projects. Learn about leveraging prompt engineering to streamline your workflow and minimise repetitive tasks. Engage with innovative strategies for achieving AI excellence.

Mastering AI: Efficient Preparation Techniques

By failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail. With AI, it's all about the research and the upfront work that you do because the output comes out in seconds. You don't need to worry about that anymore. It used to be the majority of the work. So here's how I do it. I am someone who enjoys talking. Are you surprised? I will often then brain dump the situation, the idea, the project, and just record my voice on my computer. Now, this is not something you would ever want to hear back. I often disagree with myself. Sometimes I just don't say anything for 20 seconds. It's not about entertainment like these videos. It is about trying to get all of my thoughts out of my head. I then take the transcript, and I go into a prompt engineering project that I've built for myself, which will then listen to what I'm trying to do, and then AI itself will engineer for me the very best prompt it can do to help me. At that point, I go into a new chat with this fresh prompt, and we really get started. When I have finally got myself into a good position with what I'm trying to do, if the task is something I'll repeat in the future, I turn it into a project, and I hold all of that information in a project so I can easily come back and repeat the process again, but this time with almost no preparation work required because I've done all the preparation work before. So if you want to know more about those prompts and those projects, I'd be happy to share them with you. Just DM me or comment, and let's go and make some AI magic.

Discover how real-time data visualisation can enhance productivity on manufacturing floors by 10 to 15 percent. Learn the importance of simplified dashboards and trusted data sources for effective performance measurement.

Boosting Productivity with Real-Time Data Visualisation

So I was talking to a customer recently who said that once they had visualized data to the teams on their manufacturing floors, they saw an uplift in productivity between 10 and 15 percent. That is insane levels of return on investment for the money spent on screens and keeping those screens up to date. And it makes sense. If people know their data, they can measure their performance against it. If they're not informed of what is going well and what isn't going well, how are they ever going to adjust it? I think we need to see much more data in our environments, ideally real time, and certainly has to be trusted, pulling from a source of truth and never getting out of date. Often people are putting up dashboards that they would also give their business analysts. This is a mistake too. We need to keep dashboards simple and focused on the metrics that matter, maybe incorporating a traffic light color coding system to make it even easier to understand. There are so many things we can do. And at ScreenCloud, we integrate with Microsoft Power BI and all of the other major dashboard providers. So if you'd like to hear more about data visualization, then get in touch.

A recent ROI development: integrating with existing systems to pull content feeds that already live inside your business—FirstUp, Unily, OneDrive—and repurposing them to screens automatically based on rules and logic. Your comms team doesn't have to redesign content for each channel. This gives them back enormous amounts of time for more valuable work.

Enhancing Digital Signage with Seamless Integration

A more recent ROI development for digital signage is when we can integrate with existing systems and take feeds of content which already lives inside the business and repurpose that to screens. And that's one of the key parts of the ScreenCloud architecture. So let's say you're using a communications platform like FirstUp or Unily, or even just integrating with things like OneDrive, we can pull those files and those messages which you're already pushing out on those other channels and then repurpose them up onto screen based on rules or logic and filtering and tagging and things like that. So your comms team isn't having to take information from one source and then redesign it and push it out again on another, which often we are finding they have had to do historically. This really just gives them back a huge amount more time to focus on the more nuanced work that's more valuable.

Almost every large company we work with has tried digital signage before, but reliability is the recurring issue. I heard of an IT engineer doing a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in further. The huge ROI saving with modern cloud-based digital signage is remote management—troubleshooting from afar without sending overstretched IT teams on the road.

Enhancing Reliability with Cloud-Based Digital Signage

Almost every large company that we work with at ScreenCloud has tried to use digital signage before or is currently using digital signage. Very, very few people have never put screens up and tried to use them to communicate. When we talk to IT managers and administrators, one of the big issues is reliability. Screens go in every single location, but IT tends to be quite centrally managed or in hubs and not necessarily on the ground everywhere. I heard one story of an IT engineer having to do a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in a little bit further. This is extremely costly, and sometimes it's done with contractors. And so a huge ROI saving when using modern cloud-based digital signage like ScreenCloud is in the reliability. The ability to remotely manage all of those devices, to know what's going on and to troubleshoot from afar and not have to send your IT team, who are already really far too busy and should be doing better things, out on the road just to push cables in and turn screens on and off.

A recent ROI development is integrating with existing business systems to pull content that already lives inside the organisation—FirstUp, Unily, OneDrive—and repurposing it to screens automatically. Your comms team isn't redesigning the same content for multiple channels. It gives them back significant time to focus on more valuable, nuanced work.

Optimising Digital Signage with Integration

A more recent ROI development for digital signage is when we can integrate with existing systems and take feeds of content which already lives inside the business and repurpose that to screens. And that's one of the key parts of the ScreenCloud architecture. So let's say you're using a communications platform like FirstUp or Unily, or even just integrating with things like OneDrive, we can pull those files and those messages which you're already pushing out on those other channels and then repurpose them up onto screen based on rules or logic and filtering and tagging and things like that. So your comms team isn't having to take information from one source and then redesign it and push it out again on another, which often we are finding they have had to do historically. This really just gives them back a huge amount more time to focus on the more nuanced work that's more valuable. ScreenCloud is a production of the Center for Digital Transformation and the Center for Digital Transformation and the Center for Digital Transformation for the U.S. Department of State. www.sccd.gov

Digital signage delivers immediate ROI by replacing print communication. Organisations save on print costs whilst eliminating the physical labour of updating 100+ noticeboards - a process that can take four hours for a single message change. You can push messages centrally, know they've been delivered, and manage everything from one person.

Optimising Communication with Digital Signage

So, when customers utilize digital science for their communication, they'll often see a correlating drop in print costs. Most of the communication going out historically has been printouts going up on notice boards. So this alone can be quite costly if they're doing it, you know, using a proper print company, or even just really spending loads of paper going out to all of their many, many locations. The other aspect of this is just the physical time. So if you have a large facility, some facilities have upwards of 100 notice boards, someone needs to go around and remove a piece of paper and add in a new one. And if there's any mistakes, they have to go back and do it all again. And we've heard that process taking upwards of four hours just to change one message. And then, of course, you're never quite sure when that's been completed, or if it's even been done at all, or if any have been missed. So there is a big ROI saving immediately by able to just push those messages out onto a screen, know that they've gone out, and have them all managed centrally by just one person.

Digital signage in large enterprises is run by surprisingly small teams—even in 100,000-person companies, just 5-10 people manage thousands of screens. We need to give them super admin powers. If they're managing hundreds of locations, they can't update screens one by one—they need to create perfect templates and roll them out at scale instantly.

Empowering Digital Signage Teams at Scale

So we know that digital signage is really run by a small team inside of even a very large enterprise company. And that team will be comprised of both members of the IT team who are running that network and rolling out all those screens and keeping them updated and patched and managed, and also the content team as well. Now, for both of those user groups, we need to give them super admin powers. If they've got thousands of screens and hundreds of locations, they just cannot run through a system updating each screen one by one. They need to be able to create their perfect example of content or security policies or whatever it might be, and then roll them out at the click of a button at scale. So giving them really that power status, which enables them to run the network at scale without being a huge burden. Now, we're constantly releasing features in our remote device management console and in our CMS to keep making this process easier and more secure. And it's a continual journey. So if you are a ScreenCloud customer, and you'd like to know more about that, and if you have any more feedback, please let us know in the comments below.

Canva integration was one of our most requested features, and it's brilliantly simple. You can now create or update designs in Canva and have them instantly replicate to ScreenCloud. Canva is actually a customer of ours too, which makes the partnership even better.

Streamlining Content Creation with Canva Integration

One of our most popular requests for an app integration was, unsurprisingly, Canva, one of the biggest platforms in the world that enables marketers and content creators to easily create beautiful-looking graphics. Usually, that's for social media or print, but now it's also for screen. So we've partnered with them. Canva's actually also a customer of ours, and we have done an integration, which means you can just change your content inside of Canva and have that replicated straight to ScreenCloud. It's nice and simple and works really beautifully.

QuickPost lets comms teams publish messages to screens instantly without pre-planning. Just add a title, summary, image and link, and it automatically formats everything with company branding and QR codes. We're adding AI features soon to make this even faster and more powerful.

Effortless Messaging with QuickPost App

So comms teams usually have a content calendar and have planned out all of their creative work, but sometimes they just want to put a message up on the screen quickly. This is especially true if that content manager is local and maybe is running the facility and just wants to get a message out to colleagues that day. So the QuickPost app is a simple way to achieve that. You put just a title, summary, an image or video, a link, and it will repurpose into a really strong, screen-friendly format using the company's branding and turning links into QR codes and things like that. So it makes it very, very fast to publish content. And then that can be managed inside of ScreenCloud with expiry dates, et cetera. This is just the first version, and soon we'll be applying more AI-enhancing features to make this even easier and more powerful in the future. But now you can just get your message up to screen nice and easily.