In-house AI Evangelist: Go Tell it on the Mountain

While there are definite considerations to be made as to the right time to onboard ChatGPT and tools like it, this short article focuses on the situation once a business has decided to pull the trigger.

I believe there is massive potential for a new kind of role in virtually every company large enough to support it. This role could serve as the catalyst to integrate the benefits of AI into your company in a deep and meaningful way. By embracing the nature of viral distribution a company could reach its AI goals much faster than through more traditional means.

A New Title: In-house AI Evangelist

The role I’m about to share helps the employees of the company to quickly and robustly incorporate tools like ChatGPT into their daily workflow.

I’d describe the position as follows:

• enthusiastic about the technology.?
• Has a good grasp on healthy modes of interaction with AI.
• somewhat technical, but this isn’t an IT role.?
• Well acquainted with the business.?
• Creative.
• skilled at working with colleagues.
• Exhibits ability to teach or share with others.

There is even a good chance someone at your company already fits part of or all of this description. Even if you aren’t bullish on generative AI at this point, it’s probably a good idea to start looking for them.

In the coming months and years companies will be scrambling to get their employees up to speed on the use of these technologies in the pursuit of reduced operating costs and improved time to delivery. Unfortunately, the connection between the day-to-day value of ChatGPT 4 and office workers may be trickier to establish than simply offering training courses.?People may have even tried ChatGPT 3 and were disappointed (hat tip to Daniel Shorstein who brought this up and got me thinking about this angle! https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/dshorstein/).

People need someone to come alongside them in their daily jobs and show them ways that ChatGPT can be directly employed in their work. The point isn’t to just automate tasks. It’s to show how tools like ChatGPT can augment their skills and domain knowledge to improve processes, cut down on wasteful tasks while helping them surface the portion of their value that’s been buried under those things.

ChatGPT’s Role

If your job pertains to information (which, at this point, is virtually every office job out there), there’s a strong chance you can do it better, in less time, with less stress by appropriately leveraging ChatGPT. There’s the rub, “appropriately.” There is a tidal wave of information and pseudo-information out there about what ChatGPT can do. A lot of its repetitive and some of it is simply wrong. Worse, there is some advice that would result in a kind of harm to the employees by reducing their abilities. My overarching advice on this is to focus on healthy interactions with AI. The practical way to do that, in my view, is to prefer augmentation over delegation. That’s not to say there won’t be tasks best suited to delegation to AI. But thinking about workflows and problems in terms of augmenting your own abilities over simply handing it off for something like ChatGPT to solve for you will help improve our own skills while still experiencing the substantial gains this technology can deliver.

As I see it, conveying this mode of thinking by having someone who has already internalized this perspective is akin to the disciples sharing the “good news.” An In-house AI Evangelist could fulfill this role by providing practical and relevant ways for employees to capitalize on AI that adhere to a healthier mode of interaction.

By helping employees explore their work process with ChatGPT, the evangelist will be transferring some of the ethos and approach that makes for healthier interactions. They can be there to nudge the employee in one direction or another providing an environment where the employee can feel comfortable operating in this new paradigm.

As the evangelists show more and more people, those people will be able to share their experiences with their colleagues who may want to use the same techniques discovered. ?Or they may want their own session with the evangelist to deal with the peculiarities of their own work. The point is this kind of experience makes quick “converts” of most people. When you see it for yourself, being used in a nontrivial way, directly relating to the work you do every day, it can feel truly freeing. ?It’s almost hard not to shout it from the mountain tops.

By taking this route, you are leveraging the nature of viral distribution to help your employees quickly experience the benefits which ChatGPT is becoming famous.

What’s Next?

As the landscape of life and the working world undergo these massive shifts, being able to quickly integrate the benefits of tools like ChatGPT will help cut costs as well as accelerate the rate at which one can do business. While one must always consider the risks of such initiatives, staying on top of the “AI in the workplace” public discourse will help you identify when the risk-reward ratio is at an acceptable level for your business.?By embracing new ideas about work and how one optimizes training for these new paradigms, companies can be prepared to rapidly integrate these tools at the right time. I believe this new role, and ones like it, will help facilitate the transformation of employees into savvy AI users through the power of viral distribution.

With OpenAI’s recent improvements to controls over data usage (https://openai.com/blog/new-ways-to-manage-your-data-in-chatgpt); the right time may already be upon some of you. Perhaps it’s time to start asking around to find the people who will help launch your company into the productive era of AI.