How To Career-Proof Yourself In The Age of AI

Much has been written about the changes that AI is unleashing on the workforce. Public affairs professionals are no more immune from these trends than other workers, but they do face particular versions of this disruption. In today's newsletter we provide a high-level overview of these changes, and recommend actionable steps to turn these challenges into opportunities.

Ignoring AI Is Like Ignoring The Internet

If you think that AI doesn't impact you, we'd respectfully suggest you're engaging in magical thinking. Week-in and week-out in this newsletter, we chronicle? the countless ways that AI is transforming public affairs. These changes touch nearly every aspect of public affairs including:

??? Communications with employees, clients, and policy-makers

??? Project management

??? Ad production

??? Ad targeting

??? Multi-screen targeting

??? Ad buying?

??? Influencer targeting?

??? Crisis communications?

??? Grassroots communications?

??? Opposition ad monitoring?

??? KPI tracking and reporting?

. . . and countless other aspects of advocacy work.

It's difficult to find a useful historical analogy for AI, but we believe that the closest comparison is the dawn of the Internet age, in the sense that like the Internet, AI touches nearly every aspect of technology.

Imagine it's the mid-90s and you had decided to wait out this Internet fad. How would that have turned out for you? Ignoring AI is likely to have even greater consequences, because AI combines the power of the Internet with machine learning that doesn't rely on one-for-one human inputs to express its potential.

The Rise of The AI Superworker

But there's a flip side to AI's workforce disruption. While some people will be left behind, those who master it will be more valuable than ever. AI is creating a new class of "superworkers," people who can do the job of many, because of the AI tools they are leveraging. Here's a few examples of how superworkers are already thriving in public affairs:

??? Junior-level staff creating social, grassroots, marketing, and other content at the output of 3-4x other workers by leveraging AI.

??? Mid-level executives managing double or more the project load of colleagues by mastering AI productivity and project management tools.?

??? Consultants, business owners, and partners distinguishing their companies from competitors by offering the latest AI solutions in ad production, targeting, and ad buying.

How To Become A Superworker

It seems to us that there are two indispensable skills to becoming an AI superworker—curiosity, and focus. As the great James Clear recently wrote:

"When accessing all information is common, paying attention to important information is rare."

Curiosity comes in many forms. It means reading newsletters on the latest technology changes (hopefully including this one), listening to podcasts, attending webinars, asking questions, and experimenting for yourself with the latest AI tools.

But to succeed, this exploration must go hand-in-hand with focus. The winners are the ones who cull from the sea of information the actionable strategies they can use now in their work. This is harder than ever when ironically, the same AI tools empowering superworkers, are also flooding us with more information than we can practically use.?

So our advice is to find a few key sources of information you can rely on, keep looking for others, but also keep eliminating the ones that don't drive outcomes in your career.

Scroll less. Read and listen more.?

Attention is a superpower in today's age of distractions. And it's the fuel driving today's superworkers.