How MAIA works and what we are learning: prompts, architecture, evaluation results, and findings from coaching micro-entrepreneurs with AI since 2023. Published in the open, dedicated to the public domain.
MAIA has been running on WhatsApp for Peruvian, Panamanian, Colombian and other Latin American micro-entrepreneurs and smallholder farmers for two and a half years. Over that...
There's now twenty years of randomized-evaluation evidence on whether business training helps micro and small enterprises grow. The authoritative review is McKenzie and Woodruff's...
When we designed MAIA, we assumed a good coach is a good coach. The same patient questioning, the same nudges toward tracking numbers, the same encouragement to take action. These...
Reading Impact From the Conversation: Predicting Whether MAIA Worked, Without Asking We face a typical problem with our own internal impact surveys (which are different from...
Part 3 in our series on MAIA's architecture With AI tools becoming more accessible, more organizations are exploring AI-powered services like coaching bots, advisory tools,...
Two data sources are starting to paint a picture of Maia's early impact on entrepreneurs. ILO Colombia Study: Behavior Change in Coffee Country The International Labour...
Context is a bit of a buzzword in the AI space, but it is central to making tools like MAIA useful. Context is the difference between the general answer to a general question any...
MAIA started in Peru, which remains our largest country, but one year ago we started working in Panama, in partnership with AMYPME and the ILO. As in all countries where we...
Here is the latest MAIA overview, all data as of mid-oct
The previous post described Maia's appraoch to situated entrepreneurial coaching through a continuous coaching cycle, as well as its basis in the literature. How do we actually...
The Opportunity: Closing the "Adoption Gap" Traditional entrepreneurial training faces a well-documented "Adoption Gap." After multi-day courses teaching 20-30 new business...
With Maia's new backend, we've shifted from the user's entire conversation history as context (truncated to fit into the LLM's window) to building a more intentional business &...
We built a new backend for Maia! This was for two reasons: 1) OAI signalled they would be depricating the Assistants API and 2) new features were increasingly difficult to...
Below is the current version of our prompt. As part of our new backend (more info coming soon) we've evolved the prompting set-up. We now have a master prompt that is configured...
Benchmarking LLM's has evolved from (increasingly gamed) single leaderbords to more useful task-specific benchmarks. One new super-interesting one is Vending Bench by Andon Labs ,...
Maia doesn't just sit back and wait for questions. Every week we send out a sector-specific 'tip of the week' to expose users to a broader set of topics, drawn from leading...
Why evaluation matters for MAIA Every week, hundreds of small business owners use Maia to improve their business. And Maia is not a finished tool, we are constantly tinkering and...
A core goal of Maia is to serve as an on-ramp to AI for traditional micro- and small-business owners in emerging markets. One barrier we encountered is well known in HCI...
In their book ‘Abundance’, Thompson and Klein discuss how innovation often isn't a single 'eureka!' moment, but rather a patient process of tinkering and accumulating many...
This week we asked some users in Peru "Has MAIA helped you improve your business?" Here are the responses: We're very happy with these results! In marketing terms we could...
For anyone looking to make their own AI-based MSME support tool with a WhatsApp front-end, here are sequence and activity diagrams for both the basic components (responding to...
One interesting thing we've noticed is that often, someone with very little online experience actually can have an easier time getting started with an LLM than someone with some...
Over the past 14 months, we have been intensively developing and testing this tool, including rapidly iterating on changes and observing their results to ensure the tool is safe,...
Below is our live prompt & knowledge base for our largest sector (Bodegas). A few highlights: All prompts and knowledge base resources for RAG are now in Spanish, to align with...
Now that we have over a thousand users, 4 months of open access, and some new ideas on metrics thanks to our friends at the Agency Fund, there are a few things that we can say...
Here is an interesting video of a trainer (I believe related to the ILO SIYB program but could be wrong) using ChatGPT's voice mode with a small business owner in the Philippines...
At its most basic level, an AI chatbot on WhatsApp is just an easier front end to ChatGPT, with ChatGPT instructed in a particular way and supplemented with particular documents...
Here is a presentation I gave today to the ILO's global network of SIYB master trainers. SIYB is the largest small business training program in the world, and it was a very...
As a rule I avoid new AI tool hype, but this was an interesting feature added to Google Notebook LM- a push-button explanatory 'podcast'. This one is based on just a couple...
The biggest problem we face in applying emerging academic research on AI advisory tools for MSMEs to the real world is the external validity of those results. Let me explain with...
Happy 'Dia del Bodeguero'! August 12th was the day of the bodeguero in Peru. At the Peruvian Bodega Association's celebration, Peru's Minister of Production highlighted Maia, and...
The Oits et al paper, which offered the very first and best evidence about if and how AI training could work for MSMEs, has a new version which you can find here . If you have...
There is a great 3-part series by Eugene Yan, Bryan Bischof, Charles Frye, Hamel Husain, Jason Liu and Shreya Shankar called "What we learned from a year of building with LLMs...
As discussed in a previous post, the basic version of an LLM-based advisory bot for MSMEs is like some all-knowing guru that sits in your WhatsApp contact list and waits for...
For many applications, 'user engagement' is their north star. It makes sense: users have to actually use your product, and the more they use it, the more useful it is, right? This...
In a future blog post I will analyze these questions as well as provide some conversation logs, but first we want to make the raw data available. As per our commitment to users,...
Junior is a bodega owner in Peru who shares tools and tips with his fellow bodegueros on TikTok. After trying out Maia, he was kind enough to make and share the following video...
The average Bodega owner is in their 50s, so thinking about entrepreneurial training in this sector is not about pedagogy , it is about andragogy : self-directed learning for...
A super interesting study as summarized by Ethan Mollick : "Bloomberg trained a GPT-3.5 class AI on their own financial data last year… …only to find that GPT-4 8k, without...
Below is the system prompt as of March 2024. A couple things to note: In general, we don't use prompting tricks (like offering a tip) because I've found their impact is either...
Last week, we launched image analysis. Now in addition to text messages, users can send a picture of the interior or exterior of their Bodega and get specific advice on potential...
In the first class of my first semester as an undergraduate student, Professor Larry Boland sat in front of the class and just said ‘questions?’ over and over. After a few...
Early research trying to test if entrepreneurial training improved micro, small, and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) performance suffered from a commom problem: what type of...
Its been a busy month! Here is a summary of the key updates to the system: 1) Time since last message is now included in the model prompt, so that the bot can distinguish between...
We've been looking for other projects similar to ours, and hadn't found much. There are private-sector products delivering AI chatbots via WhatsApp. And we've been reading a lot...
We are very early in the process of learning how AI can best be used to support emerging market entrepreneurs, and are actively testing many different approaches and gathering...
This is where we will post snapshots of all the details of our system including its architecture, what models we use, and how they are instructed. Our goal is to provide a...
