AI for 1099s: Separating the Pomp from the Prompts | A Free Webinar for the AI Curious | Resources for Newbies

When I re-embarked on a fractional practice in January, 2023, I was caught a tetch behind the 8-ball when it came to AI. Don’t get me wrong: I had heard of it of course, even used a few apps for drafting passable SEO-sticky copy, but I hadn’t staked my career on it … yet.?

But 2023 truly was the year the AI shell cracked open, and out poured everyone’s pent-up, pre-pandemic-size expectations for an emerging tech that would deliver us new futures (and that wasn’t crypto), followed by the afterbirth of pure panic over becoming replaced at work by an AI application.

All of my projects in 2023 were tinged with talk of Large Language Models (LLMs) and going to market with a Gen AI product, but only few organizations really understood what that meant. Just as when social media or Web 3 became?a thing,?gurus came out of the woodwork professing to be spiritually?one?with AI, as if for the past 25 years they’d been hoarding data and custom GPTs in their basements, waiting for this moment to FINALLY bestow upon the world all they already knew about it.?

Running a cursory search on LinkedIn for people with AI in their titles or companies generated 5.2 million people, versus “.io,” the web domain of choice among Web3 types, which spawned 244k listings. Indeed, everyone is an?AIpreneur, AI Analyst, AI Expert, AI Chef.?

I’m just waiting for “The Techy One” to join the Fab Five on Queer Eye who coaches people in prompt engineering; then we’ll know AI has reached cultural phenomenon status.

Korn Ferry validated that, perhaps we’re a wee bit irrationally exuberant about AI in a recent report :

Discussion of AI on earnings calls has jumped since the launch of ChatGPT last fall. In the fourth quarter of 2023, mentions of the technology on earnings calls of S&P 500 companies hit the second-highest level in ten years. But the tone may be a bit different in this latest earnings period, says Chris Cantarella, global sector leader of the Software practice at Korn Ferry, who expects leaders to temper their comments as reality sets in around the applications, cost, and risks of AI. “Leaders got out ahead of their skis a little bit,” he says. Indeed, the US Census Bureau recently found that just 5.4% of companies use AI to produce goods or deliver services. Interactions with customers, data-security risks, and cost were among the top concerns with deploying AI."

For now let’s assume a handful of us are actual AI experts; a few handfuls of us are actually getting shit done with AI, and the vast majority of us are?AI Curious.?

Yes, we all know our lives will be—are being—impacted by AI, but many of us are still futzing around for use cases. I’ve noticed a trend in my inbound email and LinkedIn feed of agencies and independent marketing specialists offering to develop content, find me leads, optimize my outreach, using AI. Frankly, I hope I can do all this myself using AI. Why would I pay?you?to load prompts into chat GPT? My prompts are not always effective (more on that later) but getting better all the time. You offering to do this work for me is like offering to make me dinner by microwaving the vegetables.

I can microwave my own vegetables, thanks.

Poorly extending this simile even further: I may not need your help microwaving the vegetables, but if you can get my kids to eat them, you’re hired!?

In other words: Provide outcomes of what you can do with AI that others can’t and you become instantly more valuable.?

Before we put out the shingle (or add AI Expert to our LinkedIn titles), let’s look at our use cases and how our existing superpowers coincide with those use cases. Are you a star press release writer? Chat GPT can already do that pretty well. But if you have a unique style and technique that others less linguistically gifted could benefit from, maybe you could create a custom GPT that mimics your style and use it to “do you” at scale.

Right now the best use cases I can think of involve productivity — mine not yours. If you want to hop on the AI bandwagon, show me how to use it properly; how to think about it; how to avoid being left behind at work by it; when to trust it and when not to. And show me when it makes the most sense to rely on myself to get things done.

Speaking of: Sign up for Optionality’s free AI Webinar for Nubes, April 24.

As some of you know, I co-founded a community of practice for independent workers and organizations supporting new ways of working called Optionality . Since launching earlier this year, a consistent theme keeps emerging in the Slack conversations and Office Hours virtual gatherings: How do I jump on the AI bandwagon without having to 1: go back in time and re-do my career? And 2: reincarnate as a machine learning engineer?

In response to this demand we bring you a free virtual webinar for AI-exploring types who want to better understand the impacts AI can have on their work, good and bad, and build a base layer of understanding to to being more informed, productive, and competitive in the marketplace.

Even if you cannot make the live time, by registering you will receive the video recording of the session. Join us!

A course that will improve your understanding of AI productivity and Prompt Engineering Skills, STAT!

Another project I am really excited and proud to share: ORG AI. This six-to-10-hour virtual AI bootcamp that uplevel your knowledge quickly and effectively. I teamed up with an intrepid bunch of doers, including future-skilling expert and former Chief Learning Officer Gina Jeneroux (pictured above, as an Webinar presenter), AI innovation firm Altruistic , and Executive Networks , the community of practice for top HR leadership in Global 1000 companies, to develop a virtual course designed to bring non-technical executives up to speed on the practical and theoretical impacts of AI. Now, with 440 executives on the platform, many of whom have completed the course and earned an AI credential, we are ALMOST ready to bring the bootcamp to individual working professionals, not just within corporations.

Here's what a senior HR executive who completed the bootcamp had to say about it:

“ORG AI has changed the way I tackle problems.? I used ChatGPT a lot (almost daily) before the Bootcamp. Now, though, I believe I have a better understanding of the possibilities – previously it did seem a bit limited. I used it more so for writing memos to overcome writer’s block. Now I think I could prompt it to write a memo that is closer to being finalized and use it for more creative thinking, brainstorming activities to fast track standing up new programs at work.”??

For more information and to receive notification when we launch the platform publicly in a few weeks, sign up here .

More AI Resources + Ridiculousness

• As part of my Startup Downturn Survival Guide series I wrote this piece on navigating a marketing role with an AI company. One year, and many laid off growth marketers later, it still applies.
• "From Fad to Framework": Emerging tech thought sparring partner Joanna Bloor opines on how to make best practices around AI real, especially for us in the media and marketing world. Her piece in The Association is a great 40k-foot-view.

And behold the rather unfortunate outcome of my attempt in AI image generation tool Midjourney to illustrate a point I was making above about there one day being a Queer Eye show expert in AI. The ironic outcome: an artifact of poor prompt engineering. Alas, my request for an image of the Fab 5, plus a tech expert, yielded something more like a Metrosexual Mashup of The Fab 4.5.

Jory Des Jardins is a fractional executive, startup advisor, and startup founder who has worked with B2B, B2C, and B2B2C companies on go-to-market, scale, and exit strategy. She co-founded BlogHer, a startup that achieved category-leading scale and was acquired in 2014, and is co-founder of Optionality , a community of practice for independent workers, giving structure to alternatives to the single-path career existence.