It’s common for stakeholders to ask international affairs professionals: “Is Country X ahead of us in ABC technology?” In the government and corporate sector, you have access to a team of cross-disciplinary experts. That makes answering this question reasonably straightforward. Answering gets complicated if your resident expert is on vacation, and leadership wants an answer before your colleague returns. What then?
If you studied international affairs or international business, you probably took a quantitative analysis course and perhaps a technology policy class. But that’s hardly enough for this situation. Speaking from experience, these are the moments where stress creeps in—and you start questioning if you’re “smart enough.”
That’s why International Affairs Thinker LLC developed the Technical Expertise Builder. It’s a generalist-friendly tool for quickly building the basic technical foundation necessary to answer your leader’s questions. In just three steps.
A familiar question, a predictable problem
Multi-disciplinary teams—innovation ecosystems—are close groupings of experts across many fields. Having access to them makes it easy to get great answers quickly. At least until a holiday, illness, work trip, or other routine disruption leaves multiple colleagues out of office.
This is usually when you get asked a question like:
Is what they’re doing cutting edge?
How do they rank globally?
In well managed organizations, all colleagues have a back-up. And most leaders are asking some variety of a question someone else has already answered. Taken together, you have some ground on which to stand.
Then it’s your turn to brief leadership. All of a sudden you question if your explanation makes sense. What if they ask a follow up question—like the ones you can think you’d probably ask—and you don’t have an answer?
Use the Technical Expertise Builder. Here are the basics.
Three steps to regain confidence and control of the timeline
Based on the technology in question, the first step is to retrieve relevant academic articles from multiple copyright compliant websites. We recommend you download the free ExCITATION plugin for Google Scholar on the Chrome browser. This plugin lets you see articles based on a global ranking metric—SJR, country of origin, and numbers of citations.
The Technical Expertise Builder how-to-video also gives you several suggestions on where to get articles if they are not available on the internet, or if you no longer have access to your university library as an alumnus.
In the second step, you upload the best ranked papers on the technology in question into a free AI research assistant.
If you want to understand the technology generally, use Excitation to get the best globally ranked papers on the topic. Alternatively, select only ranked papers from your country of interest. We recommend using one of the several AI research assistants designed for scientific research.
- The fastest option to quickly grasp the state of play in that area of technology globally is with Scispace. It will give you best summaries of key information, such as contributions, practical implications, and research gaps. It will also allow you to ask all the follow up questions you worry the leader might ask, based on the uploaded articles. Scispace can process papers in any language and deliver English summaries. The drawback is if the papers don’t provide a global ranking, you still have work to do.
- The fastest option to determine the country’s global standing on that specific technology with free tools is to use both Perplexity and ChatGPT. You don’t need to use one of your “deep research” tokens, but you need the below prompt. You get three free PDF uploads with Perplexity, that you have to upload individually with the prompt. If you have more than 3 papers, use ChatGPT simultaneously for the others. ChatGPT can digest at least 2-3 PDFs at the same time, based on experience. Sometimes it needs a little nudge.
Here’s the prompt and nudge:
- Prompt: “Take on the role of an expert technologist. Read the two attached papers to identify the research focus, methods, implications, and research gaps. Then search the web to determine if these papers are studying innovative or leading-edge concepts or technology. How do the findings in these papers rank globally based on your web search? Please provide web sources in this answer.”
- Nudge: “I have attached two pdfs. Why can’t you read them and answer my questions?”
- ChatGPT response: “Thanks for your patience — I can read the PDFs and extract the key points. The documents are long and technical, so to give a precise and useful response, I’ll walk you through what I’ve done so far and what I’m doing next to answer your full question.”
In our multiple tests for the Technical Expertise Builder, both Perplexity and ChatGPT made the same conclusion based on this prompt. They found different sources, which helped to strengthen our confidence in the ranking. For example, both AI research assistants identified key mathematical models or hardware components and checked if those were used in other recent publications or in reputable global organizations’ products.
Note, we did not get a formal ranking. We got perspective on how innovative the research was, based on the last time Perplexity and ChatGPT had their internet data updated. Check the citations for more useful contextual information.
In the third and final step, follow up with Perplexity and ChatGPT on their answers. Ask any follow up questions. Specify you want answers from either other academic articles or a specific kind of website.
Go back to the question and merge what you’ve found in the Technical Expertise Builder with the other information you have. This process can help you get a baseline for answering the leader’s question.
Why use academic articles over a tech guru blog?
Highly cited academic articles published in reputable peer reviewed journals provide a direct source of objective information. It leaves room for you to form a conclusion on your own. If there is a tech guru you know you can trust, and who shares great information publicly—yes, ask an AI agent to only use that website. But if you know the niche tech gurus, you probably aren’t a generalist that would struggle in this situation in the first place. If you’re a generalist, stick with globally ranked articles. That way you know the information has been peer reviewed and you’ll avoid consuming a potentially biased recommendation.
The Technical Expertise Building helps you get specialized, faster
Instead of delaying your leadership and waiting for your colleague to return, the Technical Expertise Builder helps you get a base level of specialization quickly and efficiently. When you start with reputable articles, you are best placed to trust the AI research assistants’ responses when they are pulling directly from those articles.
The benefits of using this tool are twofold. First, even if your colleague is available, many international affairs professionals worry about “sounding dumb” by asking too many questions about the technology. But you’re the one briefing the answer, so you need to feel prepared. The Scispace process is perfect for those situations.
Second, even if your colleague will return soon, using the Perplexity and ChatGPT process will help you prepare a more informed draft for your colleague to review. This beats waiting for a jet-lagged colleague to dig out from an overflowing inbox.
Shutdown
There’s already enough pressure on international affairs professionals fielding quick-turn requests from senior leadership. The Technical Expertise Builder is three steps to gain a technical baseline in a pinch. It can help you answer the question with reputable information when no one else is around and the clock is ticking. To further hedge against worrying that you’re asking too many questions, using AI research assistants gives you the freedom to ask all your follow up questions.
The Technical Expertise Builder is one of 3 proven methods designed by and for international affairs professionals working in high-pressure, information-scarce environments. Get the Analyst’s Roadmap—an easy to follow reference of the 3 methods: Technical Expertise Builder, Crossthink Process, and Authoritative Source Checklist. Sign up and we’ll email it to you for free.
