If you follow Josh Seiden, you’ll surely have seen that he’s spending his August vacation getting smarter on all things AI. He’s been sharing his notes and findings with me in an effort to teach old dogs new tricks. His points on simply starting the learning journey, at this point in our careers, resonated strongly with me. Who wants to be a beginner again? 😉 Nevertheless, in the spirit of continuous learning, I’ve decided to do some of my own exploration into the world of AI both drafting off of Josh’s work as well as branching out in my own curious directions. Here’s my biggest takeaway so far – AI is not a tool, it’s a teammate.
It’s not a supercharged search engine?
I get a lot of ads on Instagram targeted directly at my demographic. There’s one that comes up again and again that goes something like, “People over 40 are using AI all wrong. Stop using it just as a search engine.” It then offers me a training course. I resist these (and all) ads but they actually nailed my use case pretty well. I’ve been trying out various AI tools over the past year as a search engine – albeit more powerful and interactive. And, so far, in my day to day use cases searching has been the primary use case. Sure, I’ve had it format some documents for me, create some nice looking assets and summarize some legal contracts but all of this feels like a very basic step up from Google.
AI is your teammate – for any situation where you might need a team
This is where the lightbulb really went off for me in the past couple of weeks. While Josh and I collaborate on content, courses and business planning for Sense & Respond Learning, we delegate the work and then go off individually to complete the task. Also, there are two of us with largely overlapping skillsets and experiences. This greatly limits what we produce to our shared knowledge.
Enter AI. Whatever your flavor is currently – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, et al – AI tools can function as any and every part of the team you need to achieve a goal. The basic prompt that I learned from a comment on one of Josh’s LinkedIn posts was:
Acting as a [ROLE] what do you need from me to [TASK]. (Credit: Mike DeSart)
I love this as an opening prompt. It’s simple and clear and starts the conversation. Like any text box, what you enter into it the first time starts you down the path to discovery. From there you can refine the conversation, requests, questions and resulting ideas.
So far, I’ve had AI become my strategic advisor for Sense & Respond Learning. It’s also my teaching assistant and course transcriber and editor. Earlier this year it was my travel agent. I’ve never had these types of folks on my “team.” I’ve found the process enlightening and exciting. The conversations only end when I run out of time, patience or focus. At times, the conversations have ended simply because the output was overwhelming. There were so many choices I needed to focus and make a decision. The bot helped me out with that too.
The power of being able to add any role, skillset or functionality to my work is incredibly powerful. The ideas I’ve been able to generate with my AI teammates have given so much to work on this fall. I can’t wait to get started. This is definitely not a new search engine.
A cautionary reflection on the AI tools I’ve used
Part of the learning is understanding which tool is going to be one I’ll invest in. They all remember context and conversation and so, at some point, I will have told one of these bots enough that their answers will be steeped in my very personal context. To figure that out I ran the strategic advisor exercise with Claude and ChatGPT. Remarkably, they came up with at least 80% of the same ideas when given the same input. This tells me that their training was also similar. If all of these tools are trained on the same models, their output will inevitably be similar leading towards a homogenized world of experiences, products and services. This is where the humans will continue to play a role. The tools will make us faster and smarter but they won’t replace our creativity and intuition. Make sure you don’t outsource that to your AI buddy.
