The AI guru sharing his wisdom with rabbis, Jewish charities… and parking wardens

From there, Hartzel, 48, saw the opportunity to pivot into AI training and consultancy, and within just two years of starting his new business, he is now trusted by the Jewish community as their go-to guy for all things AI.

For example, he told the story of how he helped a friend with constructing a eulogy for a prominent rabbi, for whom the “outpouring of messages” at such short notice made for an impossible task of writing something representative of the whole community’s love for him.

“My friend said: ‘The funeral's tomorrow, and I just don't have time to read them all,’” Hartzel explained.

“So, I took all the information that people had written, and we did a sentiment analysis on it, and 83 per cent of people said that he really welcomed them into the community and helped them settle in. Ten per cent said this, five per cent said that, and so on.”

“Someone could say: ‘Oh, he should have read them all himself,’ but the guy's got the funeral in a few hours. This way, he got to hear from everyone – it was almost like having an assistant.”

With AI’s unprecedentedly fast incursion into all aspects of our lives, it should come as no surprise that Hartzel is so busy.

Craig Hartzel on a Work Avenue panel (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]

Among the many training sessions he has done through Work Avenue for organisations across the UK Jewish community, Hartzel, who is a member of Hendon Synagogue, said that his favourite was with a large group of United Synagogue rabbis.

“They said to me: ‘We want to engage the younger generation. How do we do that?’ So, I suggested we look at data [of historical events and their turnouts], and it showed that it could be just a get-together with some sushi for people that aren't necessarily interested in learning Torah, but they've still been brought up in a traditional Jewish home.”

“It was it was really good fun, and then at the end, we had a competition for who could get AI to write the best joke. Rabbis like to tell jokes.”

Further to helping the rabbis with their event planning, I asked Hartzel if AI could be useful for Torah study itself.

“You can upload Gemara or Torah [to an AI chatbot] and have a conversation with it to try and understand its meaning, and it can provide a one-to-one, user-specific way of explaining things that resonate with an individual.”

“But you've got to be very careful with bias,” Hartzel warned. “Then again, if I talk to two rabbis about the same thing, they're going to give me different responses. They've got their own internal bias as well. All these old biblical texts are down to interpretation.”

Influential people and organisations increasingly seem to be realising that AI literacy is an asset, he said.

The Association of Jewish Refugees has found his insights particularly useful, using AI to transcribe images and old documents. This, said Hartzel, would be a gamechanger for them, allowing them to trawl quicker through their extensive archives.

He has also helped several Jewish charities to optimise their fundraising. “If you have a database of all your events, you can upload it to AI and ask for meaningful insights,” he explained.

“For example, you can ask which of these events gave the best return on investment. We found that for donors who are older than 50, events with a speaker who has been affected by the cause get a much higher level of donations.”

Outside the Jewish community, Hartzel has been appointed fractional AI officer of the Lancashire FA, which wants to better understand data to help get more children into grassroots football.

He has also built them a customised AI assistant – “think of it like their own ChatGPT, but with an internal knowledge base,” he explained.

Craig Hartzel (right) with shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Mel Stride (centre) and Conservative councillor Ameet Jogia MBE (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]

But AI doesn’t just dominate Hartzel’s professional life; AI’s pervasive nature means he has been utilising it in his personal life, too.

To help the girls at his daughter’s Brownies club achieve their technology badge, he ran a session where the children used AI to collaboratively make a comic strip.

“They were all in a circle, sat on the floor, and I said: ‘We’re going to think of a story, and you are all going to say a little part of the story.’ And we went round, making a superhero comic, deciding who the hero was, the sidekick, the adventure, what they’re looking for, and so on.”

“At the end, I had ChatGPT create a story based off what they had said. I printed out the comic strip, and my daughter took it to them the next week, and they all loved it”.

Hartzel continued to tell me about AI’s presence in his daily life. He explained how he used AI to argue his way out of a parking ticket, using the UK’s traffic bylaws; to find a substitute for his favourite hair product when it was discontinued, by checking for close matches of its ingredients; and to decide what to cook for dinner using a photograph of what was in his fridge.

And AI is certainly not a bad business to be in right now. With Hartz AI, it is likely that Hartzel will be very occupied for the foreseeable future, offering his services to small- and medium-sized businesses and charities, helping them become AI-literate.

With all that he has learnt so far, what does he recommend to JC readers when it comes to using AI themselves?

“The biggest thing that I always teach people is to always ask why, because it's going to give you confidence to know that the AI is giving the right advice.”

“It gives another viewpoint in the room,” Hartzel concluded. “I’m not saying that viewpoint is right or wrong, but it's certainly valuable nevertheless.”