AI and Future Focused Leaders: Reflections from Jump Offsite 2023

When a person in-the-know tells you about what's happening in AI, you listen.

When that person chronicled the technology world as the founding editor of Wired magazine and cataloged the computer revolution alongside Stuart Brand, you really start to engage.

So when Kevin Kelly opened the Jump Offsite 2023 on the main stage by saying that another Big Bang in technology is happening right now, we strapped ourselves in and waited for more.

Kevin's insights propelled the Jump Offsite forward from the start. Below are a few insights I gained along the way.

Kevin Kelly: A Primer on what AI Is Today.

Kevin Kelly thinks about the current state of AI technologies as being:

Artificially “co-creative” software…emerging as a new, conversational user interface…that allows for “+1 relationship" interactions for people to use as we build, discover, and problem-solve.

Artificially Co-creative Software

Today's AI applications are best understood as software for co-creation.

Kevin shared the generative AI art pieces he’s been co-crafting to highlight what this means to him. And he made an observation I didn’t want to hear: creativity may be “less sophisticated, and more mechanical, than we thought.”

"Creativity may be less sophisticated, and more mechanical, than we thought."

AI applications leverage those mechanical processes of creativity in the background, and then offer us pathways to build new things. We should think of AI prompters, who craft the instructions into the AI dialog boxes, as becoming the new artists of a co-creative medium. Very quickly our artists, strategists, technologists and more will be sought out and “paid for how well they interact with the AI’s.”

Conversational User Interface

The conversational user interface emerging from today’s AI applications is what makes Kevin feel certain we’re having another big moment for technology.

He reminded us that it was the web browser's graphical user interface that opened up the internet, made it accessible to everyone, and launched us into the future that we’ve been enjoying for the last 3 decades.

That’s what he sees in ChatGPT and Bard, for example. It’s not the data models that matter most. It's the conversational UI that feels most revolutionary. Think of conversational UI like another Big Bang that is making a technology massively more accessible. “Now, we’re going to apply it to everything.”

Think of conversational UI like another Big Bang that is making technology massively more accessible.

+1 Relationship Interactions

When you combine a conversational UI with a co-creative software, what is emerging may be thought of as “+1 Relationship" interactions.

These tools generate personalized interactions based on best practices learned from the wisdom of the crowd (aka big data).

Start with your favorite metaphor for personalized service:

• Assistants
• Coaches
• Guides
• Teammates
• Co-Pilots
• Navigators

Through conversational UI, today's AI applications are designed with these types of personalized services in mind.

Having access to personalized support and advice is proven to improve performance and health in many fields. In education, it’s so effective that researchers dubbed solving the challenge of how to offer personalized tutoring to all students the Two Sigma Problem.

Unfortunately, this level of personalized support has been broadly inaccessible. Until now.

To illustrate, Kevin shared the story of AI Esther.

In late 2022, a technologist created a "therapy bot” to help himself. Inspired by the work of psychotherapist Esther Peel, he trained the bot on her blog posts and talks. The tool asks questions and provides follow-up’s based on responses it receives, just like Esther advised in her works.

Esther Peel, herself, commented on AI Esther at the 2023 SXSW conference. No, she doesn't think that a bot is a fair replacement for her counsel. But the thing is: most people can’t access a 1-on-1 session with her. So instead, they buy her book. And, as Kevin paraphrased, “in some ways, the bot is better than my book or my blog. And it’s certainly better than having no therapist at all.”

“In some ways, the bot is better than my book or my blog. And it’s certainly better than having no therapist at all.”

Certainly, having a personal relationship with a world-class therapist is better than having an interaction with a bot. And having an AI-enabled interaction with a remote, live therapist will likely be better than just using the technology by yourself. But "+1 relationship" interactions with AI are going to offer real value to infinitely more people, who wouldn't have had access a trained therapist before.

Bringing it Home: Strategy, Culture and Leadership

When we attend a gathering like the Jump Offsite or TED, it's important to think through how we'll bring the big new ideas back into our own world.

So we engaged with Kevin's ideas. We talked about how to combine his vision with other calls-to-action from speakers on the main stage: from an appeal for climate leadership to a vision for the Metaverse, and from a call for AI ethics to a discovery about the strength of personal power, not just social power.

We talked in deep dive conversations about how these ideas might affect our responsibilities in strategy, innovation, growth, and marketing.

Just as importantly, we talked about what these ideas bring up for us personally. What might we need to do, or change, to bring the future focused leadership that our teams need now.

Applying the three lenses of strategy, culture and leadership in those discussions helped me think more fully about what I was learning from the main stage.

Here's how that might look with respect to Kevin's AI primer:

• Lens 1: Strategy - What should our company be learning and doing about AI? How might we build new offerings, respond to new competition, or change our operations? What could it look like to transform the organization?
• Lens 2: Culture - What should our team be learning and doing about AI? How might we make changes to how we communicate, how we collaborate, or how we discover and develop talent? What could it look like to stand by our most important values?
• Lens 3: Leadership - What should I be learning and doing about AI? How might I try something new, lead by example, and find a sense of clarity amidst flux and change? What am I willing to risk to do that?

I realized during the offsite that most of the dialog and writing I've been encountering about AI lately has focused on the first lens: the tech and its strategy implications. Product-oriented thinking often brings us there most immediately.

In large organizations, however, that's not how real change happens. All three of the lenses are always at play in our decision making. It was refreshing to be reminded to look for how those parts end up fitting together.

The Jump Offsite 2023 was a great success. And it was in no small part thanks to folks like Kevin Kelly who fed our heads with new ideas and inspired our conversations to become the personal reflections we all needed.

Can't wait to see what we discover and who we meet at Jump Offsite 2024. Hope to see you there!

The Jump Offsite 2023 was held on May 16-19 in Sonoma, CA.