AI limitations

I spent a few hours on Saturday working on extracting data from our CRM and using AI to transform the data with the goal to ultimately use AI to enrich the data to provide a better analysis.

My initial thinking was that ChatGPT should at minimum be just as good as some of the older ETL tools I’ve used. It was unfortunately a mixed bag. ChatGPT was able to do some basic joins, but it was very prone to bugs and ultimately did not pick up on what my end goal with the data set was for. I do attribute a bit of this to my prompting skills that probably could use work.

However, I did run into multiple bugs and issues such as telling me they successfully brought in data points from another spreadsheet while leaving the column blank. There were definitely a lot more bugs and errors than I thought I would encounter especially because I was not asking it to do very complicated things and an Excel formula could’ve also solved what I was trying to do.

Ultimately after an hour of playing around with it, I ended up just doing it the old fashioned way with Excel formulas and end to end that took me no more than a few minutes. I’m sure there are more specialized tools out there as ETL tools exist for a reason, and I’m convinced that with the right prompting, I could’ve make it work. But at this point, some tasks are likely still lot easier and quicker the old fashioned way.