Hitchhiker's Guide to AI at Work

This is the first instalment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to AI at Work. Originally read by forgotten hero Peter Jones, the guide is now voiced by Stephen Fry. This article will cover AI as it was on Earth around the year 2025 from our correspondent on that godforsaken planet, Ford Prefect.

This advice is likely to hold good until around 2030, when Earth itself will be destroyed as part of a new intergalactic superhighway known as HS3.5. However there is no need to limit yourself to Copilot. Ford Prefect found that both ChatGPT and Perplexity are excellent products which you can use alongside Copilot on almost any device.

ChatGPT

Earthlings tend to start this conversation with ChatGPT. After Grok, this is the worst name for a chatbot ever conceived. All the branding and terminology, use of the word bot and so forth is anathema to those business folk most likely to derive significant benefit from the tool.

Unfortunately, it is by far and away the most functional, the most feature-rich and most impressive of all the AI bots available at this time. It is created by OpenAI who do nothing else. It is great because they need it to be great to make money and because they have been working on it a long time.

A colleague we shall call Rose helped us test this out last week. This correspondent was rendered speechless by its capability. Trying to extract 1500 phone numbers from a VCF contact card database is not the easiest thing in the world. The VCF format is so legacy it was also legacy twenty years ago.

ChatGPT’s first response to this prompt? Hold my chocolate martini.

With a single prompt ChatGPT was able to understand the VCF format and write a Python script to convert it into a CSV comma-separated file with two columns (name, phone). It then ran the script automatically and saved the output to a file that could immediately be used in Excel. Watching this drama unfold was a piece of art: the code literally wrote itself as we watched with wide eyes.

Game over for the others.

Apple Intelligence

Apple isn't the company it was under Steve Jobs, who was at the helm when Ford Prefect first visited Earth. Back then their flagship product was the Apple Macintosh, Macintosh being a type of apple fruit. Nowadays it is... something else. The iPhone probably, or the iPad. Ford Prefect understands from reliable inside sources, themselves members of a sect known as Gen Z, that their kind no longer use laptops, and desktops are right out. Their tools of choice are the iPhone and the iPad. Someday soon they will need only their voice.

Apple Intelligence got off to a stumbling start after inventing news headlines that didn't fit the story underneath. Apple was never that great at software. The only surprise is the level of anger directed at Apple by the news media. Wasn't Apple just writing brilliant clickbait? And are not most of those organisations just clickbait factories anyway? Ford Prefect believes the true source of their anger was the temerity of Apple for eclipsing even their most immoral hacks.

Perplexity

In extensive testing Ford and friends found that Perplexity was their favourite AI tool by approximately two parsecs*. It is more than a mere chatbot and is comparable to Google's NotebookLM, although this focuses on analysing your own documents whereas Perplexity is primarily for advanced internet research. It also has some similarities with OpenAI's Deep Research feature. To call Perplexity a search engine is to call a Formula 1 car an entirely unnoteworthy form of mechanised transport.

Perplexity is especially noteworthy because it allows you to choose from a range of models from OpenAI and from Chinese alternative DeepSeek.

* Note from Stephen Fry: A parsec is a jolly sight further than a mile.

Copilot

Your boss will make you use this. It is excellent if you use Microsoft Office. However, Microsoft is a laptop company that depends on Windows, more or less. If Gen Z stop using laptops, it is likely that they will ditch MS365 and Copilot too. Employers need to get creative here.

However, for the next 5 years or so, this is the tool to get expert at if you want to turbocharge your career and make yourself indispensable. It's very good on the Office integration but it's a pretty ordinary chatbot. A future article will focus solely on Copilot.

Gemini

Google did not name Android after Marvin the Paranoid Android, sadly, but it did provide the idea for this article. Google are to be commended for being the only other mainstream company to build their own public models. They came late to the game but are catching up with OpenAI, having deeper pockets*. Gemini is brilliant if your employer uses the Google Workspace stack and can be installed on Android or iOS phones. It is very good indeed. Subjectively, Ford Prefect believes it easily beats Copilot but is not yet level with ChatGPT.

* Note from Stephen Fry for Gen Z: there used to be a form of money known as cash, for which pockets proved to be the perfect receptacle.

DeepSeek

Never install this directly. You can access their models safely through Perplexity, amongst other ways.

Claude

Mostly Harmless. Like Earth.

Grok

Don't bother.

Trillian Explains

Hello! This is the part where I translate Ford’s article into ‘normal people’ speak. Nothing to do with Sally Rooney.

By ‘normal,’ I mean those of us who have an interest in tech but aren’t coding geniuses. In today’s world, having a basic understanding of AI is becoming essential, even if you’re not nearly as astute as Ford Prefect.

Also, if you—like me—haven’t seen The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you might not get Ford’s 1970s references. I’m here to break it down.

AI has been the talk of the last two years, and that’s largely because of Large Language Models (LLMs). So, what exactly is an LLM?

Put simply, it’s an advanced (for Earth) AI tool trained on massive amounts of text to understand and generate human-like responses. Think of it as an extremely clever chatbot that can help you write, research, summarise, problem-solve, and even brainstorm ideas. It doesn’t think like a human, but it’s been trained on so much information that it can provide answers that often feel smart. In that sense it can be a little like Vogon poetry.

Whether you’ve already embraced AI or not, it’s time to roll your sleeves up. LLMs are being rolled out across workplaces, so getting familiar with them now is a smart move.

So, where do you start?

Try something simple: download ChatGPT (or just use it in a browser) and use it to plan your meals for the week or even an upcoming holiday itinerary. It’s user-friendly, and honestly, it’s pretty decent. Getting comfortable with AI now means that when your workplace rolls out tools like Copilot, you won’t be left staring blankly like a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal in the headlights of a passing spaceship.

There’s a whole range of AI tools out there, but once you’ve got this basic understanding, go back and read Ford’s article—he knows his stuff.

A note about the contributors

The part of Trillian is played by Danni McCarter, a former PwC consultant and expert on earth-based artificial intelligence.