How to "AI Foolproof" Our Businesses (and Careers)
By staying ahead of the curve.
If it wasn’t an election year, the whole “AI replacing our jobs” story would probably be getting 10x the traction.
But, even so, I know a lot of us are pondering this…
So I wanted to put together some thoughts for your consideration.
For starters, I want to point out something important…
OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015.
Nearly 10 years ago!!
ChatGPT wasn’t created overnight.
And for people close to this technology…
The “buzz” of the last year is surprising them a lot less than the general public.
So, we need to remember…
AI isn’t improving at an exponential rate of 10x per year. It’s slowly getting better. Little by little.
I believe it’s going to be a transformative technology… but that this is going to take much longer than most people realize.
Back to the question, though. If we’re not 1-2 years away from retiring, how do we make sure we stay ahead of the AI curve?
A good starting point is to look at what jobs generative AI is already replacing.
From where I sit, it’s four types of workflows:
Fact research
Whether we are talking about a legal question in our business…
Explaining an industry trend…
Or detailed setup instructions for a software…
ChatGPT is like an interactive Wikipedia on steroids.
It’s incredible at digging through information and giving us a relatively buttoned-up answer.
Quality control
Another thing generative AI is great at is checking large amounts of information for errors, inconsistencies, etc.
You can feed it a 50,000 row spreadsheet and ask it to check for a given word…
And get an answer within minutes!
There are applications here in accounting, administration, HR, etc. that are game-changing.
Transactional messaging
While I wouldn’t rely on ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot to write important emails for me…
These tools are quite good at writing simple alert emails, crafting one-liner sales personalizations, and sending texts with event updates.
For lower stakes communication that needs to get out the door quickly, their scale and speed are hard to beat.
Data processing
This is probably where I am most impressed so far.
You can give ChatGPT a huge spreadsheet, and ask it to split into 5 files based on a key variable…
And get your new files back in seconds!
And OpenAI’s API comes with a ton of increased functionality on this front.
In light of these capabilities, it’s helpful to think about how the 8-10 hours we spend a day overlap with them.
If our job (or business) is based heavily on fact research?
Or on doing repetitive quality control grunt work?
Or on sending lots of low stakes transactional messages?
Or on doing tons of intense detailed data work?
There is a good bet that AI can already or will soon be able to do the majority of this work.
So, if we’re in this boat…
I think it’s a good idea to start figuring out how to add value to the work in ways that AI can’t. Because there is almost always a way.
And if we’re doing things that don’t overlap?
Like high stakes client calls?
Writing website marketing copy?
Physically installing cabling on the side of the road?
Making critical decisions on where to open new properties?
I think we should still leverage these tools where we can…
With the peace of mind that it will be a while before they have any major bearing on the demand for our skillset.
Because from where I sit?
Human communication and human decision making aren’t going anywhere in our lifetime. No matter how good AI gets.