Letting AI hold a tool

This is the step that turns AI from something that only talks into something that actually does the work.

What function calling is

Picture an assistant who speaks very well but sits in a closed room with no telephone and no computer. Their advice is good, but they cannot look up the stock, cannot book an appointment, cannot send an email. Now hand them the right tools and teach them when to use each one, and the value changes entirely. Tool use, or function calling, is the mechanism that lets an AI model reach out to external tools and systems to fetch real data or carry out an action, instead of only producing text.

How it works is tidy: you declare a list of tools with descriptions in advance. Meeting a fitting question, the model does not invent an answer, it holds out a structured request, for example check_order_status with DH1029. Your own system is what actually runs the function and hands the real result back. On 13 June 2023, OpenAI released this for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, opening the way for AI assistants that can look things up, calculate, and act on real systems.

How this applies to running a business

I find many people still think of AI as something to write a few paragraphs. But the large value in a business arrives when AI is wired to real tools: checking orders, updating spreadsheets, drafting and sending replies, creating appointments. At that point AI is not talking about the work, it is doing part of it.

What has to be kept is clear-headedness: handing over a tool is handing over authority. An assistant permitted to send email on your behalf or change data needs clear limits and a checkpoint on the important actions. The right tool, the right permission, the right place to check, is a whole piece of design.

If your AI were wired to exactly one tool in your systems, which would you let it hold first?