AI Everything Everywhere All at Once

(In the beginning a disclaimer: if you prefer podcasts to reading newsletter, here's an audio summary of this AI in Coaching newsletter edition (it's made with the help of NotebookLM by Google ). Let us know what you prefer: newsletters or newsletters turned into podcasts :)).

Someone was asking a question about AI adoption once. Whenever that point in time, those days are pass gone. We all know it: AI is everything, everywhere and - all at once.

A couple of examples for starters...

• My 10 y old son was asking TurboTara open cource voice model from AI Town who would win EURO 2024. Got angry when she said Spain months before the finals. But still had a good conversation and exchange of viewpoints on football club's strengths and weaknesses.

• I have been a gym and nutrition fan for the last 2 or 3 years (since 40s hit me :)). I created my custom gpt that follows my interests in the topics, advises me about specific options and provides feedback on ideas. Does a great job as an AI diagnostic of skin conditions (cosmetic, not medical, of course). I recall when Vichy launched a free AI diagnostic tool years ago - was very happy about it. Now you have the one that actually learns from you and has a solid memory of you.

• There is research that AI performs well on emotional intelligence tests. With this in mind, I like (again my custom gpt, some sort of a synthetic CEO with a human in the loop) to read some of my emails, check for tone or offer other suggestions. I like it to rate some of my projects or proposals etc.

• In my university professor role, I tend not to ban AI use. I tend to embed it and enforce critical oversight. As an example, I say to the students: "You may use AI to solve this problem or work on a project, but if you do so, write a disclaimer and share your view on the output". Sometimes my students got a better grade for the critical analysis of an AI solution, than for the solution itself.

Of course there is more. (You tell me yours now!)

The point is: opportunities are vast. They are biggest in the field of divergent tasks without one correct solutions. I recall my first university classes in Developmental Psychology app 22 years ago. Our professor was making an argument that our schools are "One Correct Answer" types of school and that we need to advocate for changing it. Now with AI, we can say it works best when there is not one correct answer because of the probabilistic (and to a degree random) creation of outputs. That is why generative really means creating something. I think we tend to downplay this fact. We still hold a view that AI should be precise, robot like, more accurate than human. Current state of Gen AI is divergent, playful, unexpected and "erroneous" in terms of our expectations for a One Correct Answer.

For organizations, there is a whole vast of new skills that are the future of work. It's not just about automation and process optimization. Although I know this is the first thing to come to our mind. It's more about mindset of safe exploration. Learning how to use AI and fit it best into your work context. It takes some knowledge (around AI capabilities in various domains) and skills (in prompting and creation of customized assistants), but most of all a mindset that there is more to AI than automation. In the field of corporate L&D, GenAI is a great resource. Here are some of my favorite personal use cases:

• Designing interventions design (e.g. training programs). A caveat here. If you don't customize your AI agent (custom gpt or whatever the alternative), you may not get a satisfactory result. You get the most if you create your own AI Intervention Designer, "feed" it with relevant context, your style and pedagogy of designing interventions, theoretical background etc. Then you get an output and still work on it until you say "go". So it's a human in the loop all the time. Or Human + AI, if you like.
• Creating conference agendas. Similarly as previous. You may get surprised with the output. For example, AI tends to add more interactivity than I would normally do (not that I don't make this interactive, but just there's a moment of additional surprise of someone else's ideas that diverge - often in a good way).
• Analyzing transcripts of training sessions as a means of evaluating effectiveness of the training process. I like this use case very much. With its emotional intelligence abilities, (custom) AI can be very good in analyzing engagement, atmosphere, leadership, participation, interactivity...
• Monitoring of user feedback from L&D interventions with recommendations for trainers. Nowadays we have weekly resumes of qualitative user data on our AI tools. It's textual input of users' impressions, use cases, obstacles, ideas for improvement. AI tools can be really helpful in summarizing key points or pointing your attention to the emerging themes. A useful data analytic tool with recommendation feature. Needs a lit a bit of customizing also.
• And of course - there is more.

We developed our own proprietary AI system (Coachia) with crafted AI agents inside. There is an AI Simulator, AI Tutor, AI Reflection Buddy... For each L&D project, a set of customized AI agents to support the learners. Already bragged about receieving the Award from the Innovation Fond za inovacionu delatnost , but still need to mention that we are truly grateful for the support that validates our ideas and brings us closer to making them a reality.

From organizations back to kids.

Again as a psychologist, question emerges to me: how do we make our public schools more in tune with tech developments and the opportunities for learning that are out there with AI now. Can we offer our kids and teachers the same tools we offer to high ranking business leaders? Can it be affordable, safe and developmental? I don't know honestly.

As a baby step in that direction Kou?ing centar joined an Erasmus+ project titled AI Navigators: Empowering teachers for the AI era (thank you Lachezar Afrikanov for the invite!). The project aims to motivate teachers and educational leaders to integrate AI into the teaching process, improve AI literacy and create a regional network of AI Navigators. Soon we will launching public calls for teachers in Serbia to join, so stay tuned and give a shoutout to any innovative and initiative teachers you personally know.

Back to the title.

We need more conversations about AI. And we are taking the responsibility for organizing one. On November 29th in Hotel Crown Plaza we are organizing a conference titled Vision 25: AI Everything Everywhere All at Once . We will get together business and public sector leaders, L&D professionals and AI innovators to share practical insights and inspire each other.

Registration is already out there. It's all at once.

P.S. To end with another podcast with NotebookLM: my book on coaching turned into a podcast with AI. Here's a link to a post on that.