Strategies to Leverage AI and Thrive in Your Career

Each week, I share insights and strategies for business innovation and career growth through the intelligence of data, AI, and leadership.

A version of this newsletter was also published on Substack yesterday.

AI Anxiety

During a recent Berkeley AI Strategy office hour I hosted as an instructor, multiple people shared that they feel “AI anxiety.” Concerns ranged from how AI disrupts job roles to the pressure to gain expertise to use AI effectively. What was interesting is that there was no lead-up to this topic. It was an open discussion about the future of AI and its impact on business. A few days later, I read an article in the Harvard Business Review referencing a study stating that AI anxiety is pervasive.

??I have this theory that AI anxiety often exists when people see and hear how valuable AI can be for value creation or personal productivity but fail to explore it and engage with it daily. It's kind of the fear of the unknown or apprehension to change. In addition to anxiety, this reduces your value proposition compared to others in your craft who are leveraging AI to be more creative, resourceful, and productive.

In this newsletter, I offer some strategies you can leverage to reduce AI anxiety and make AI your partner to boost your productivity and impact.

From the Harvard Business Review “Anxiety About AI is Pervasive” article (Sep/Oct 2024) issue:

"Three-quarters believed AI will reduce the number of jobs in the United States over the next 10 years. Worry about the negative effects of AI on the job market was especially high among adults with less than a bachelor's degree and those aged 45 and older."

AI advancements continue to accelerate, and the daily news about technology advancements and how people use them can accentuate AI anxiety. Most people feel the pressure due to the uncertainty of how AI influences job security and the need to change. This can be especially challenging for people with fixed mindsets who are slow to recognize the need to change and take action.

AI anxiety is also disorienting business leaders, given the pressure to articulate an AI strategy to remain competitive while balancing the forces of AI hallucination, risk, ethics, and change management.

AI anxiety can stem from:

1. Job Displacement - Many fear AI will automate tasks and processes, replacing human workers in various roles, especially in sectors like manufacturing, logistics, customer service, and even white-collar jobs like data analysis or legal research.
2. Irrelevancy - Many worry that the skills they’ve spent years developing will become outdated, requiring them to adapt quickly to new technologies or risk falling behind. Feeling inadequacy or becoming irrelevant in your craft is a deep emotional force.
3. Economic Inequality - There’s concern that AI could widen the gap between highly skilled workers who develop, manage, and use AI technologies and those whose jobs are most at risk of automation.
4. Business Competition: Leaders are feeling the pressure to adopt AI to remain competitive in markets where AI can rapidly influence the industry structure. Leading organizational change in a disruptive market can also become stressful, given the emotional state of employees and the need to shift the culture.

No one can control the pace and impact of AI technological innovation, so it’s best to adopt strategies that help you adapt and ride this wave.

Adopt These Mindsets

Here are a few mindsets you can leverage to reduce AI anxiety and thrive.

• Focus on What You Can Control—This is the foundation of Stoic philosophy, which forces you to recognize and accept what is within your control and what is not. You cannot control AI’s influence on the job market, your craft, and the pace of innovation reshaping our world. But you do control your mindsets and how you show up each day to learn and adapt.
• Beginners Mindset - Embrace that there is so much to learn, and this is the ingredient for personal and professional growth. Be open to new experiences to learn and challenge assumptions and the status quo. The availability of free resources to learn AI is vast, which can exacerbate AI anxiety. I recommend managing a learning roadmap in Notion or Excel to sequence the learning experiences to your career goals. I primarily teach the Berkeley AI Strategy course to learn and share the latest AI tech trends and business strategies with leaders who seek to apply this. The more I teach, the more I learn.
• Curiosity—I find that approaching life and careers from a perspective of curiosity reduces the pressure that one needs to know everything to be successful. Put your ego aside and approach AI as a new city you are ready to explore. Ask questions and revisit your mental models of how you perform your craft. You may need to leave previous successful strategies and techniques on the roadside.
• Focus on the Present—Our minds are always racing, and the rapid pace of AI can often boost anxiety, given the uncertainty about the future. Over the last year, I have practiced daily meditation using the Calm and Headspace apps to manage my anxiety. This has improved my mindfulness and helped me identify when my mind has wandered into the future and bring it back to the present.

AI anxiety is a real emotional force, and using the mindsets above can help us neutralize it by taking action using the approaches I describe next.

AI as a Thought Partner

Over the last several months, tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have become my trusted advisors daily. I use them to help me think through challenges and brainstorm options to reach a high-quality decision. I have found that the ChatGPT desktop app is a game changer, as I have it open and available on one of my three screens. By using ChatGPT memory, you get relevant answers more quickly by not having to explain various aspects of who you are and the help you need. For example, I asked ChatGPT to help me refine my LinkedIn headline, and because it had the background of my brand strategy, it recommended a new headline and the reasons why.

Here are a few techniques to use AI as a collaborative thought partner:

1. Share more context: AI tools perform best when you provide more context to your situation and what you will explore through a collaborative discussion. One technique is to leverage AI memory to have the context of past discussions and information you have shared. Also, share background information, such as your current point of view, what you are challenged with, and how you need AI to help you. AI tools are excellent at analyzing files such as PDFs and images. The more context you give at the start of the prompt, the better the AI tool will provide specific responses relevant to your topic. ChatGPT makes connecting your OneDrive and Google Drive to your account easy.
2. Ask for help and ideas: Drop the ego and engage AI with curiosity and vulnerability by asking it for help. I see AI tools as my “co-intelligence” (coined by Ethan Mollick in the book Co-Intelligence) and speak to them as my collaborative partner. I ask them for ideas and perspectives that I have not considered.
3. Learn intuitions: Getting an answer or perspective is not enough; you need to understand the logic and intuition behind why the AI recommends a position. Asking the AI to defend its ideas and tradeoffs is a great way to learn and identify the strategy behind the AI's reasoning. This will help you broaden your perspective and decide with greater confidence.
4. Specify personas: Describe the characteristics you want the AI to embody or specific personas who are the thought leaders relevant to your topic. I generally refer to a few specific people I respect and admire together with specific knowledge the AI must have, such as an expert in machine learning.
5. Stay curious and collaborative: Engage an AI as a trusted advisor and friend with a curious tone. Say thank you and provide feedback so it can learn from you. See it as more than a machine but with emotions and a desire to provide you with support and value.

Recent Example

Here is an example of how I applied these techniques this past week. Given that I play multiple personas, I felt the need to tighten up my brand positioning and value proposition. I often capture my ideas visually through diagrams. I shared context with ChatGPT through a picture and asked it to help me brainstorm ideas and recommendations. It came back with a detailed analysis of my career strategy and specific recommendations to strengthen my brand and monetization strategies. This was aided by the fact that I use ChatGPT daily, which has built up a memory of who I am and the context of previous discussions. The accuracy and depth of ChatGPT’s analysis from a single picture were impressive. Sometimes, a picture does say a thousand words.

Note that you can protect your data and privacy by turning off the setting for ChatGPT to use your data to train its models.

AI as a Coding Partner - For Everyone!

It’s a common misconception that you must be a programmer to develop an AI or software solution. The game has changed now that AIs can produce popular code such as Python, React, JavaScript, and HTML.

GitHub Copilot revolutionized software development, primarily in the enterprise space. I have used it to create prototypes, and I am impressed by its capabilities to strengthen my programming skills and reduce development time.

However, a recent trend allows non-programmers to develop code and software products using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Replit. The best way to learn AI and reduce anxiety is to use it. You can become an AI product developer by using these tools and watching YouTube videos.

While the goal is likely not to become a technical expert, your knowledge of what is possible can magnify your vision as a business leader and improve collaboration with technical people within your organization.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a powerful tool for generating code for web development, machine learning, scripting, and mobile app development. It creates HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, making developing a static website easy. I occasionally use it as a pair programmer to help with Python code. It’s been years since I used it daily when I did my master's in data science!

One of the best ways to learn AI fundamentals and how to code is to share code example snippets with ChatGPT and ask it to explain what the code is doing. For example, popular frameworks such as LangChain include quickstart examples that walk you through functional prototypes.

Claude

Claude.AI 3.5 Sonnet with Artifacts will automatically generate popular code such as HTML, React, and Python from your prompt. Claude Artifacts is a powerful feature that allows Claude to create and manage standalone pieces of content during your conversations. Think of them as digital documents or files Claude can generate to help you with various tasks.

One of the most user-friendly aspects of Claude Artifacts is how they're displayed. When Claude creates an artifact, a separate pane automatically pops up to show you the visual content. This feature makes it incredibly easy to:

• Instantly see the results of your requests
• Collaborate with Claude on refining the content
• Compare different versions of artifacts side by side
• Easily copy or export the artifact for use in other applications

This visual approach bridges the gap between AI-generated content and practical application, making it simple for non-programmers to leverage Claude's capabilities in their projects.

For example, you can ask Claude to build a website or a mobile app UI. Claude generates the HTML automatically and renders it in a Preview pane.

You can see the code by clicking on the Code pane.

Clicking the Publish button in the lower right lets you publish an artifact online for viewing or “remixing” with other collaborators.

Cursor

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that helps you streamline the coding process and generate code from prompts. It’s built upon the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Code IDE. If you are not a programmer and need motivation, I suggest watching the X video that became popular a few weeks ago. It shows how an eight-year-old used Cursor to build an AI chatbot in under an hour.

Here is a video of a non-programmer developing a working web application without writing code using V0, Cursor, Replit, and Claude.

Of course, it helps to have some basic programming skills, but these tools democratize AI innovation and open all kinds of opportunities for everyone. All you need is creativity and curiosity to develop software that boosts your productivity or automates workflows in your small business.

Replit

Generating code using AI tools is here, but the next challenge for a production use case is how and where to deploy it. This is where AI agents can automate entire workflows. An AI agent is a system designed to reason through complex problems, create actionable plans, and execute these plans using a suite of tools. The agent has access to a suite of tools and decides what tools to use for the task.

A few days ago, Replit revealed how Replit Agent can generate code from your ideas and deploy fully functional apps with no coding experience required. This is truly incredible because deploying software to IT infrastructure is generally complicated and certainly a barrier to entry for non-programmers.

• Overview of Replit Agent
• Replit Agent Demo Building a Full Stack App

AI as Your AI Avatar

I have recently become more intrigued by virtualizing my knowledge into a digital avatar. This is your AI twin, available to yourself and others on demand. While this is not a new concept, taking action to operationalize it is a great way to learn AI and build self-awareness of your expertise.

Your AI avatar can boost productivity and relegate common and repetitive tasks to the AI, enabling you to spend your precious time on higher-value tasks. For example, I coach 200+ technical grad students. After seeing hundreds of resumes and LinkedIn profiles over the last two years, I documented the best practices and operationalized them in an OpenAI custom GPT. This enables students to get coaching before meeting me for a live session, helping us be more productive!

Coding your knowledge allows you to clarify your value proposition better.

• What are you an expert in?
• What knowledge do you have that would be valuable to others?
• How could you codify it and scale your impact?

An example is world-class coach Marshall Goldsmith and his AI avatar MarshGoldsmith.ai. This avatar provides free coaching using the vast corpus of his books, articles, and videos to share world-class expertise.

I will share my development and progress in operationalizing my AI avatar in future posts.

Next Steps

The best way to learn AI is by doing.

Using AI tools with curiosity and courage daily will build expertise and boost productivity.

Following other AI thought leaders on LinkedIn and X is one of the best ways to get a daily dose of AI.

Please share your ideas in the comments on how you use AI daily to boost your productivity and impact.

Good luck!