The Friday Thing #861

En route back from a few days in New York talking AI. ??

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The Friday Thing #861?is on the topic of AI and regards a post I shared earlier in the week on LinkedIn. It got such a positive reception that I thought it was worth sharing here too.

One of the recurring questions during two panels I was on at the AI Deciphered event in New York is “what are the barriers to adoption with this generative wave of AI?”

My response to this is a real barrier is breaking our existing patterns of work to form what I called “an AI habit”. We all have ways of doing things. Ways that we have developed over time or learned from others we have observed – and while they often serve us well, it’s some of these very practices that we need to break to reap the true the benefits of AI. One of my co-panelists remarked upon how we have been trained over twenty plus years to enter a search term into a search engine and accept the result we get back. With generative AI, he encouraged a much more iterative approach – treating these exchanges as a conversation you may have with a colleague to develop an idea or find a path to an answer. I have learned to do this a lot and rarely find myself using a search engine in the “traditional way” these days.

When I needed a contact number for an airline this week, I simply asked Copilot in a conversational tone and got the answer. No need to go to the airline website, find the contact or about page and track down the number. When I wanted to check if there were any gigs I could squeeze in while in Gotham, I asked Copilot “what gigs are on in Manhattan tonight” and almost instantly received a list of 5 concerts scheduled for that evening – without any need to go to Ticketmaster, search, filter and sort. The other habit I am forming here is to not just think about AI as an assistant at work, but throughout my day – be it work, play, life, learning.

I share that mix in the slide below this week and people seem to find this a valuable tool – hence I am sharing again here. You can download the slide, along with a ton of other examples our team built from the Copilot Scenario Library. I hope you find it useful and maybe a slide you can edit and create your own version?

Alas, I did not manage to squeeze in a gig while in Manhattan. Next time perhaps.

On that note, music for this week is Blue Monday from New Order?with the new remix from Michael Johnson. Incidentally, I learned last week that Quincy Jones originally refused to remix this song because he felt it was already perfect. I tend to agree….

Cheers and happy Friday.

-Steve