6ai | applied intelligence Serious Software for Serious People

Useful innovation often comes through a process of discovery; a series of steps, and within each progressive step, there must be additional steps of scientific inquiry, tests, contemplation and iterations to complete before moving to the next step. All steps must be covered.

— Albert Einstein

According to the World Bank, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the global economy, representing ~90% of all businesses, driving about 70% of employment, and contributing significantly to GDP (often >50%, up to 70%). Their value to global prosperity lies in job creation, innovation, economic growth, and resilience, acting as key drivers of diversification and adaptability in a changing world. Despite their importance, the vast majority of SMEs are unable to access top-level consulting services that can help them with transformation and growth. This is primarily due to prohibitive costs and a fundamental mismatch between the corporate-focused models of the big consulting firms and the agile, specialized needs of smaller businesses. 

Large consulting firms have high overheads and fee structures designed for multi-million-dollar corporations that can afford those high fees, which are too expensive for most SMEs. Secondly, with limited capital and the significant upfront costs associated with a consulting project, there is little chance that SMEs can ever achieve any meaningful ROI.

Generic vs. specialized needs: these large firms often apply standardized, one-size-fits-all methodologies designed for large-scale projects, which are neither appropriate nor effective for the unique, niche challenges faced by SMEs. 

The bottom line is that large consulting firms prioritize large corporations due to the potential for large fees, long-term engagements and overall higher value for their bottom line. These consultants are completely disconnected from the reality of running a small business, and engagements can span several months, even longer, clashing with the need of SMEs for agile, immediate solutions and faster results. 

Furthermore, for years, strategy development has leaned heavily on top-down theories favoured by top business schools, often amplified by major consulting firms such as McKinsey and PWC, who partner with and recruit academics to validate their approach. This has led to a business model that feels out of touch, neglecting the valuable insights that front-line employees bring. These consultancies often miss a crucial point: the best strategies aren't found in outsourcing but in the combined knowledge of those closest to the work, in the SMEs.

Currently, there are no real options on the market that present viable alternatives or value to SMEs. Independent consultants may have specialized skills to offer, but often they’re just a cheaper version of big consultancy models, with much less resources. Specialized boutiques: smaller, niche consulting firms can be a viable alternative, but they are usually highly specialized, focusing in scientific and engineering domains and IT-type projects. You may find government programs offering subsidized consulting and grants but I don't believe that you'll find real expertise and value there.

The applied intelligence process

Breakthroughs usually do not come from dramatic leaps of insight and revelations, but rather from building upon and innovating what has already been proven. As a result, the most productive and transformative innovations often arise by expanding on previous knowledge.

But consultants usually tell us what we already know, should know or can easily learn ourselves with a little bit of effort. In the digital age, there is no need to outsource to consultants, advisors or specialists. Provided with the right software tools, expertise is usually just a keystroke away.

What SMEs need instead is a knowledge and insight resource that blends expertise with practical experience to help us develop relevant, actionable strategies for winning!

The first step for organizations to take is to cultivate the applied intelligence do-it-yourself approach. This process involves applying critical and independent thinking to transform information into knowledge, fostering insight and rational strategic decision-making. A defined six-step (6ai) Socratic human-centric software that doesn’t seek to make AI competitive, surpassing, or replacing human intelligence. It takes an augmenting approach instead, amplifying human intelligence capacity and capabilities.

The first step is figuring out your business strategy before investing in a project or idea. For example, leaders who aim to enhance organizational performance through digital technologies, must put strategy first! Understanding that the strategy will determine the next steps—what specific technologies to implement.

However, in the evolving age of AI, companies have been putting the cart before the horse, focusing on a specific technology (“we need machine learning, we need agentic-AI models”) rather than doing the hard work of fitting the innovation and change into the overall business strategy first.

6ai Technologies solutions provide an easy-to-use/do-it-yourself software that doesn’t require any special training or skills. It isn’t about replacing people; it’s about enhancing human productivity capacity and capabilities. And 6ai is your strategy partner.

But instead of leveraging the human capacity of insiders, leaders often bring in outside consultants, not because they’ve assessed a solid technology that can make a difference, but because of the fear of being left behind. The applied intelligence approach, on the other hand, doesn’t lead by fear nor abstraction. It relies on fact-based reasoning and insiders to generate sustainable enterprise value.

Staff have intimate knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. Supplying them with augmenting software: my6ai enhances and accelerates learning and insight generation, empowering people to build executable strategies with incredible speed and accuracy.

Working with my6ai enhances both the enterprise and human value simultaneously. Key employees or partners can examine what their unique contributions to the organization and connect those strengths to building strategies within the enterprise. The team-oriented single platform and dashboard functionality puts everyone on the same page, providing for a sense of belonging, and an entrepreneurial spirit and team vibe.

The applied intelligence (ai) system is based on the Socratic method, developed by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. A form of communicative dialogue based on questioning to stimulate critical thinking and articulating reasoning. Gaining knowledge and know-how through seeking the the objective truths.

6ai is the optimal blend of machine-scale intelligence with human judgment and empathy, which is exactly where real, sustainable research and strategy live.

Democratizing strategy development so anyone can design anything from high-level, multi-billion-dollar corporate strategies to personal growth strategies—themselves—without the need for any special skills or training—at a fraction of the cost of hiring consultants or advisors. This is the essence ofmy6ai.

The applied intelligence (ai) system-methodology is a thinking and reasoning framework on factual information, a tool that builds human capacity, helping ordinary people achieve extraordinary things!

The use of generative AI in the applied intelligence context does not aim to make AI competitive, surpass, or replace human intelligence. Instead, it acts as an augmenting partner, a reinforcing tool that is practical, purposeful, and responsible — enhancing human intelligence, capabilities, and creativity.

6ai does not employ large language models; instead, it develops ai focused language models, integrated into customized AI agents to carry out a multitude of tasks, which underscores our core architecture, built to scale!

Hence, every successful organizational strategy must be underpinned by an in-depth understanding of the competitive market landscapes. Which can be captured by our proprietary IP: Conversational Contextual Questioning Framework (CCQF) and Open-ended Probing, Clarifying, and Socratic questioning (OPCS); forming the basis of insight generation through formal logic, with structure and premise.

Accordingly, the overriding objective of the 6ai architecture, is to flesh out the idea and find its highest degree of utility across the most probable future worlds. This is called finding the Maximum Utility of the idea, relative to the unpredictability of the idea existing in ever-changing environments—the real world.

Identifying the winning characteristics or conditions for the idea to succeed is critical because how the future unfolds is independent of the idea. And you can’t figure out a winning strategy unless you can clearly state what winning looks like, most especially, what winning looks like in the context and your organization.

6ai generates realistic assessments and differentiates between the organizational capabilities that allow you to just “play” in an area, vs. those that can allow you to compete and win. It guides the user through a step-by-step progressive process, retrieving and developing highly relevant information and turning it into insight for strategy formulation.

6ai customized Strategy Development Agents (SDA) are like engine pistons, deployed self-contained autonomous entities that carry out multiple tasks by multiple Agents working in concert. An integrated and complete set of capabilities rather than disembodied ones: SDA’s ability to communicate, cooperate, and negotiate with other agents, relative to the 6ai Socratic Method, makes the system processes seamless to integrate into the overall 6ai strategy development process.

In sum, all of this captures the authentic aspirations of users for them to execute on their vision, and further aims to create an empathetic space and team environment where users can share their thoughts, ideas, and perspectives through an engaging, thoughtful process.

Why 6ai

6ai offers a framework for users to engage with their challenges and ambitions through an authentic, well-defined and disciplined bottom-up strategy development process. Guiding individuals to discover knowledge, generate their own insights, and develop strategies themselves.

6ai is for serious people, those who want to maintain their human agency and seek lifelong learning. It's not for those not willing to think for themselves, or seeking quick and dirty hallucinating summaries, i.e., ChatGPT.

6ai is diametrically different from LLM-based products and offers a focused and thoughtful alternative that everyone can use. It’s a tool for human progress, advancing users’ intellectual capabilities, empowering them to prioritize and contextualize information to gain better insights to thrive in the 21^st century!

...my6ai