With AI, Don't Get Stuck Like a 'Roo in the Headlights

There is no doubt that AI is a game changer - literally changing the way that we do our work, come up with new ideas and create. It can calculate, analyse, research and produce. And it can do it astonishingly quickly. In fact, AI is so fast you can feel like a kangaroo dazed by bright car headlights - and literally freeze on the spot.

But just ask any project manager, and they’ll tell you that they live by the “triple constraint”. You can have anything delivered:

• Fast
• Cheap
• Good.

But you have to choose two.?

When I think about AI, it feels like it is doing the heavy lifting around “Fast”. It is also impacting “Cheap”. But its scorecard is mixed on “Good” - the quality matrix.

Sure the initial results of generative AI will amaze you. Ask Midjourney to create a photo realistic image of a kangaroo hopping down the roadway on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and you’ll eventually get what you want. Or close enough. Imagine what such a photoshoot would cost - the team, the permits, the traffic disruption.

The interesting thing, however, is that if you can work with AI on the Fast and Cheap conditions, then some of your savings can be invested in quality. This might look like:

• Code reviews with an experienced developer
• Rewriting of text by a master copywriter
• Reconceptualising of visuals by a creative director
• Validation of analytics reporting by a data scientist.

In our case, with kangaroo image, we may creatively decide that we need to move in a different direction for the campaign. Or we could re-work the image to get closer to our goal. Or again - we could iterate with AI and refine and refine until we get a result we can work with.

Some of our clients are revealing 30-40% productivity gains through the use of AI. They are saving real time and money on a range of tasks, but finding that AI is far from a silver bullet. In fact, in some instances, after trialling AI they are returning to previous, human methods.?

So we can have fast, cheap AND good - but we still need to choose. And the choice is to invest in good. To invest in quality. And this is not just about the end of the cycle - it’s investing in the whole production line. We need great understanding (and ability to explain) creative processes. We need a critical eye when reviewing AI materials. And we need to bring our commercial, creative and critical thinking to all of this.?

After all when it comes to AI, we don’t want to be stuck like a kangaroo in the headlights.