NBJ Summit: 5 things natural supplement brands should know about AI

Most CEO conferences are squarely focused on the benefits and potential threats of artificial intelligence to the leaders in the room and their businesses and industries, and this was certainly the case at the 2024 NBJ Summit.

The AI Mindshare session attracted a group of Summit participants who were mostly focused on asking their burning questions to the two AI experts in the house: Steve Brown, chief AI officer for Abundance360 and PHD Ventures, and Pelin Thorogood, co-founder and executive chairwoman at Radicle Science. Much of what was discussed was individual- and company-specific, but here are a few of the general takeaways from the AI Mindshare:

AI Adoption—Brown’s and Thorogood’s main message for everyone in the presentation was clear: Harnessing AI tools is like having the smartest assistant in the world available to help you whenever you need it. Others are taking advantage of this Super Assistant. You and your people should be too. The tools available to you go way beyond OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has seen faster user adoption than any other new technology tool in the world. New AI tools and platforms are being launched every month designed to help business professionals with everything from automating routine manual tasks such as data entry to analyzing all that data and designing it into a beautiful presentation to training and coaching the humans in your organization.

Related:NBJ Summit: Educate dietary supplement consumers through social media platforms

Prompting—How do you get the most out of an AI tool such as ChatGPT? The power is in the prompting. A good prompt starts with clarity, specificity and context setting. Talk to AI the way you talk to a person and build upon your initial prompt with follow-up questions and requests based on the results you receive. If you’re not getting what you want, you can ask ChatGPT how to make your prompting better. This is good news because the more you use ChatGPT or another generative AI tool, the more it learns about you and what you’re seeking—and the more aligned and valuable its output will be.

Trust—Along with a lack of understanding, trust was cited as a main barrier to the NBJ Summit executives using AI. Afterall, humans know how to evaluate and build trust with other humans. How do you do this with an AI chatbot? One way is to look for transparency. Can you easily find information about the AI tool and the data sources powering it? Because an AI chatbot or other tool is only as good as the data that powers it and can be prone to AI hallucinations (those incorrect or misleading results that are presented very confidently as fact), always double check the accuracy of the information and data it spits out at you.

Intellectual Property Protection—The trust topic brought up questions about IP protection and how you can legally protect your IP in the age of AI. The short answer was that, with AI moving so quickly, business leaders would be wise to understand how AI is changing the world of intellectual property and patents—and be proactive in protecting their valuable IP and information. As AI provides countless advantages in business, Brown and Thorogood encouraged the session’s participants to explore how the technology can benefit and accelerate innovation. Earlier in the day, Cepham Founder and President Anand Swaroop discussed how the new NutriGenie platform harnesses AI to advance nutritional ingredient discovery and shorten the time to market for a new dietary supplement or other product.

Personalized Nutrition and Health—One area of opportunity being mined by the NutriGenie team and that also came up in the Mindshare discussion is personalized nutrition. We’ve been talking about the emergence of artificial intelligence nutritionists for a few years now and companies are creating apps and websites that leverage machine learning to offer up meals and eating plans customized to an individual’s needs, preferences and health goals. Large players such as Nestle are also harnessing AI to inform product innovation that can help them develop new offerings tailored to support specific disease states such as diabetes or desired health outcomes. AI has the power to finally make N-of-1 nutrition a reality.