My Only Prediction for 2025: You Will Have An AI Awakening.

Well, here we are. The end of yet another year. Perhaps it’s that I’m getting “more mature” (ahem), but time is an elusive and cunning partner in life. 2025 rings in a whole host of conflicting emotions, from some rather heady optimism about the economy to a continued reality that society is becoming increasingly fragmented, polar, and, dare I say, tribal. We vacillate on a day to day basis between?joy to dread to indifference. It’s the indifference of the latter that keeps me up at night.

Usually at this time of year, I share with you a series of predictions for the upcoming year. I’m not going to do that this year. Rather, I’m going to focus on one single issue. And here it is:

My Only Prediction: You Will Have An AI Awakening In 2025 If You Haven’t Already.

AI (as defined by Large Language Models (LLMs)) has been with us now for two years. From a news cycle, you can’t avoid it. Big Tech has gone all in. VCs are lining start-up?pockets. Gazillions are being spent on data centers, model development, and new products. There is no clear leader, on a technology level. ChatGPT has the largest market share,?but there are many models that give it a run for its money, from Claude to Llama to xAI. Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini are now mostly integrated but still early. These native models seem to only be focused on task automation rather than big thinking. That’s not magic.

But this is not the point. The development of AI is just that – stuff being built. People?adopting?AI and experiencing exponential momentum is where reality meets vision.

For me personally, AI has been transformative, and I believe it can be for everyone. And I believe this will happen to you in 2025 if it hasn’t already.

Here are my recommendations starting in January for those early in their?AI journeys.

1. Ask AI the big giant questions.?

Don’t underestimate AI’s ability to understand the nuances of your business and your job. Lean in and ask the biggest, tangliest, complicated questions you face. Too often I see AI being used as an enhanced search engine. If that’s what you want, use Perplexity and get more answers. But for the thorniest of challenges, go deep.

2. Be thorough and aggressive.?

If you want to get the most out of a specific AI project, give it everything on your mind. Explain to it the specific challenges you’re encountering. Explain your nuances. Be vulnerable but intensely curious. Your prompts should be paragraphs long! If you do not believe it’s digging deep enough, be aggressive with the AI and ask it to be more specific, more nuanced, more deep in its analysis. (It will also suggest that it does that itself.)?AI works for you,?and you get to treat it with the aggression and directness that would be nearly impossible to do with your human colleagues.

3. Feed the beast.

To get the very most from AI as a leader, feed it as much information as you’re willing?or able to give it. Upload or provide access to your strategic plan for 2025. Give it all the materials you used to devise it. Ask it to pick it apart or supplement it with external research. Feed it research you have that’s bespoke and not on the Internet for training. Give it everything you can so it?can learn about you, not the other way around. The more you give, the more you receive.

4. Ask for citations!

AI can still hallucinate, although it’s not at all what it was at the beginning. So if you felt it was a mess in 2022 or 2023 and didn’t trust it, it?was?both a mess and untrustworthy way back then. But not (as much) now. When doing any type of AI research, always ask for the AI to use real sources, real world data, and ask for citations.?It will do it. If you don’t, it may not. And that’s a problem. Asking it to only use viable, real world data prevents most hallucinations.

5. Lead by example.

Your team needs to see you using these tools and sharing with them how you are using them. They need to see and experience your output. You have an opportunity to learn together at the dawn of a powerful new technology. This is 1995 Internet all over again. But they need to see that you “get it.” Many of them have already been using these tools for work, and without your guidance and leadership, many will feel as though they are cheating rather than adding exponential value, and they have concerns about that and their own job performance or evaluation. AI is here to create faster, smarter outcomes for enterprises, people, and leaders. It’s not just?happening?to us. Lead them to the other side and…

6. Experience a breakthrough together.

If you follow these recommendations, you will experience a breakthrough for yourself, your career, your team, and your mission as an enterprise. AI can be a?great gift to progress. But we’re in this early/middle zone where people don’t know their guardrails or what’s expected. If you say “I expect we will collectively experience a major breakthrough together through our use of these tools in 2025,” then you’ll have a team that is focused and energized to migrate their work from the tasks they do to the higher level accomplishments we humans all desire to be a part of.

Easy right? Actually, yes. Just start. Stick with it. Fail a TON. But most importantly, lead. I wholeheartedly believe that in 2025, the gap between those brands and people who have incorporated AI into their daily work and those who don’t will show up on balance sheets and P&Ls, and we all know what that means: it’s become very, very real.

I’m eager to hear how you’re using AI throughout the year! Share with me, please. Also, if you’re struggling to get started for whatever reason, reach out to me. I’m working with leaders of all types to put the building blocks of success together in place. I’m here for you and your?teams as well.

Happiest of Holidays to all of you!

Andrew, Founder

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