Here's How to Embrace New Technology

Generative AI can create content — including text, images, and even music — that is often indistinguishable from work created by humans. As generative AI systems become more sophisticated and capable of performing tasks that previously required human expertise, people are increasingly worried about their livelihoods.

Sree Sreenivasan , CEO and co-founder of Digimentors , helps people and companies adapt to technology. He chats with LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman on the latest episode of Get Hired to explain how to get ahead of the curve and use technological changes like generative AI to your advantage.

You can listen to the episode above and read a transcript of the conversation below.

TRANSCRIPT: Here's How to Embrace New Technology Like AI

Andrew Seaman: Remember the story of The Three Little Pigs? One little pig made his house out of straw and another made his house out of sticks. The big bad wolf blew both of those down, but he couldn't do the same when it came to the third pig's house, which was made of bricks. Well, in the world of work, the latest big bad wolf is generative AI, which many people fear will put them out of work. So how can you build your career out of bricks so it doesn't happen to you? Well, we're talking all about it on today's episode.

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn senior managing editor for Jobs and Career Development, bringing you conversations with experts who like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

We've all heard about artificial intelligence. It's not new, but we're hearing a lot more about generative AI, which has the ability to create content based on prompts. The reason is that a lot of big name generative AI technologies burst into the public realm earlier this year. As with any new technology, the arrival of generative AI came with dire warnings about what it means for workers. I'm paraphrasing here, but they all basically boil down to, "You're going to lose your job because your work can now be done by a computer."

If you're worried about AI and what it means for your career, you're not alone. As someone who creates content for a living, trust me on that. My research and experience with AI suggests those dire warnings are overblown though. For example, new technology can be credited with 85% of employment growth that has happened over the past 80 years, meaning that people have adapted over the years even as technology has changed the world of work. Few people adapted better to technology than the person joining me today for our discussion, Sree Sreenivasan, who is the CEO and co-founder of Digimentors who works with companies and nonprofits to get them smarter and better on social and digital. Sree has a long history of helping people and organizations adapt to technology. Previously, he was the chief digital officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, chief digital officer of the City of New York, chief digital officer of Columbia University where I met him more than a decade ago when I was a student and he was dean of Student Affairs at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. So let's start with where Sree gets his adaptability.

Sree Sreenivasan: I will say that one of my favorite expressions is I'm all for progress. It's change I cannot stand. And if I were thinking about why I am adaptable, it might be because of where it started. I was born in a hospital in Tokyo to Indian parents and my dad had no problem in the window picking me out. He said, "That brown one, that's mine." And from there, I've been always an outsider or different in some capacity. There, of course, in the obvious capacities, but in different ways. My dad was an Indian diplomat, so we lived in so many different countries. I grew up in my first 18 years, I lived in seven countries and multiple continents and moving every two, three years. That meant you had to be adaptable just to survive to stay ahead.

And when it comes to technology, it might've been because I saw the value very early of how you can stay connected, in my case to India. My father's work took us all over the world, and I remember seeing one of the India's national newspapers had a weekly edition that they would send out by mail or courier to some Indian diaspora folks. So they were not sending you seven days worth of mail of newspapers. They were sending you one 4 or 6 page newspaper to understand what was going on in India. So that helped me understand the value of curation, shorter information.

And then when the internet came around, it was all about connections. Again, connecting, in this case again, back to India. My grandmother had an email address in her town in India, and it's not because she was tech-savvy, she was not at all, but she heard there was this way to get in touch with people in America using email. And what would happen is I would write to her email address, it was basically a store, and then they would print it out and this guy would get on a bicycle and cycle over to her house and read it to her. Then she would dictate something back and then he would come and type it in the office, and I would see. This is in '94, '95, which was so early. And so that was where I understood the power of email.

And now of course you fast-forward, we're in the world of WhatsApp and all kinds of ways to communicate and of course LinkedIn itself and LinkedIn and its messaging systems and all that. As someone who has seen so much change, seen the good parts and the bad parts, that is the reason why I try to adjust to change. I recommend to every family if they can afford it, to live someplace else. It doesn't have to be some exotic foreign country, just some other zip code for six months because then kids are forced to adapt to a new culture, new neighborhood, new faces, et cetera.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that's really great advice. Obviously, you now do this where you are helping organizations and people adapt to changing technologies and changing communications with Digimentors, but you've also done it with huge institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the whole city of New York, and Columbia University. So for people who are listening who are job seekers or interested in progressing in their career, what would your message be for them too?

Sree: My number one message is that if you don't stake out place for yourself in the changing landscape of technology, you don't try to stay ahead, you don't try to understand it, you don't try to learn all the time, you're going to be falling behind. And falling behind can make the difference between having an opportunity to get a promotion, be considered for a new gig, show your team what you can do, versus as someone who's always following, always trying to keep up and struggling in that process.

And I will say that technology is difficult and it's hard for people to use tech, and that's why that was one of the excuses for folks. But in more recent years, technology has become easier and faster. You can do a lot with just your phone or your iPad or your laptop. One of my hashtags is always be learning and find something that you are not comfortable with and try to learn it. You can never master most of these things, but can you have some facility with it? Can you be comfortable with it? So I recommend to everyone, pick one or two things that a little bit about, but not enough. It could be something like Canva, which is a great tool that people use for design. It could be anything. Just get better at that and you'll benefit.

Of course, the main thing that everyone should get better at, including me, is LinkedIn itself. I think there's unlimited potential on LinkedIn for a variety of reasons. People don't use it to its capacity. Even despite me being a fan, despite me teaching LinkedIn all the time to folks doing workshops all over the world about LinkedIn, I still don't use it enough to produce content that I should be doing. And that's a function of a variety of things, but also that people, as you know, have for a long time thought LinkedIn is about job hunting. It's about finding a job. Instead, it's career management. There's so many skills about using LinkedIn that if you learn you can benefit from your colleagues and you can bring people in and they will be very impressed when you show them a single LinkedIn trick.

Andrew: Yes. And actually, and even being on the inside of LinkedIn, I sometimes learn are new things just incidentally. And obviously, I think the newest thing people are hearing about is artificial intelligence. I know in March, I think it was when ChatGPT really burst onto the scene, people were terrified about what that meant for them. And I actually remember thinking about the sessions that I've seen you give over the years. You're typically not afraid when new technology comes out. You have a background in journalism. I have a background in journalism. We're terrified when something comes on the street and says, "Hey, we can do this without you." When you heard about generative AI and you saw it really coming into vogue earlier this year, what was your reaction and what has been your message to people?

Sree: Yeah, this is a moment where I realized this is going to be so transformative. But we've heard that about a lot of things, right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Sree: "NFTs are going to change everything. Cryptocurrency is going to change everything." But this was really different. I didn't know how different until I started playing with it and saw firsthand what it can do. And you're right, it came out in November was when it was publicly launched, but it didn't take off until the spring of 2023. Even today with all the noise around it, I can tell you that a lot of people are aware of it, but not everybody's actually gone in and written a prompt as they call it in ChatGPT. Or did you done it once and let it go?

Just like in LinkedIn, it takes a while to understand what LinkedIn can do for you, right? There's some magic number. I remembered it used to be 50 connections when LinkedIn was a lot smaller. I wrote my first article about LinkedIn in 2006. We were like, "Hey, everybody, get to 50 connections and then you'll see the value." Now it's probably like 500 connections or whatever. Like that, there's a tipping point in technology where you say, "Okay, I'm going to use this. I understand that this can make my life better."

I tell people that to be really effective, any technology has to fit into your workflow and your life flow. And if it does, then it becomes something that you embrace and you use every day. I mean, the iPad is a great example. The iPad is something that many people were excited about when it came, it was a new thing, and then people just got bored of it and didn't use it. But then some specific professions found new users for it, and then they loved it, and now that's what they use, right? So that's what happens with technology.

Back to generative AI, AI has been around for a long time. Just because something's out there, doesn't mean you have to use it or jump in. I'm much more in favor of dipping your toes and trying rather than jumping in headfirst into fast moving rivers. And if that's your attitude, then you'll learn and then see where it makes sense. And maybe it doesn't make sense to use it today, but it could be tomorrow, it could be another time. No industry is going to be exempt from this. In my workshops, what I tell people is that as you're thinking about this, find the things that make sense for you. So I put up a chart of the top 100 startups in AI. We think a lot of it is about marketing and words and images and things like that. And of course it is, but it's also agriculture, retail, fashion.

Any industry you'll see, there's smell tech. All of these industries are going to be there. So I'm working maybe not in a very high level at one of these places or a very high level. I'll be thinking, "Well, this is coming to me at some point to our industry. Maybe it's already here, maybe our company's not there yet. What can I do to read, understand, and be ahead as much as possible? Because it's changing so quickly." And in an organization that doesn't know much about this, the people who know a little bit are going to stand out. Instead of worrying and fearing it, I call my workshops my non-scary guide to AI, or why I'm not afraid is I believe that expertise is going to stand out. Wisdom, knowledge, experience, background, understanding is going to stand out, humanity is going to stand out, and we're going to win.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Sree after this break.

Andrew: And we're back with Sree Sreenivasan, CEO and co-founder of Digimentors. Where do you suggest people start with any new technology that sort of gets dropped in their lab?

Sree: Yeah, the simplest way is to actually go into it, and we can give a couple of examples. We use the word ChatGPT so much it's St. Kleenex, it's a brand. There are so many kinds of AI systems. ChatGPT is from a company called OpenAI, so you'd open an OpenAI account and then you'd go in there. The faster way than that without needing an account and all of that is to use your Google account and go to bard dot google dot com, which is Google's answer to the Microsoft's OpenAI, is Google's Bard. And then go in there and type something you know a lot about. Maybe your own company's name or your favorite athlete or your cousin or anybody or even yourself and see what comes back. Of course, if you have a common name, maybe you won't come back. If you don't have a big online footprint, it doesn't come back. But that's okay just to see what comes back. And that's where that magic is in this stuff. You can keep asking to improve the answers it gives you, right?

On Google, you can do a lot of what ChatGPT does on just searches, on Bing or Google. We are in a Microsoft environment here. It's giving you answers rather than giving you lists of information that it sort of appears to learn. It's not quite learning the way a human being learns, but it's, "Oh, you don't like this? Okay, how about this? You don't like that? How about this?" So that's how it's doing it. My case, I went in and typed in my name and said, "Who is this person?" They gave me a bio. There were six errors. I'd gotten an award that I didn't get. I had written a book that I've not written. But what'll happen is that this will now become real in the sense that someone's going to take that for some interview and copy and paste it and type it, and then that becomes part of the information that we all accept as real.

But to back to your question, how do you start? By dabbling in things so that you know, so that you can see when something's a mistake or something's accurate because you know it, right? You could ask about your favorite basketball player or about your industry, the work that you do specifically.

Andrew: Yeah, that's really good advice. And then for anyone listening, because Sree mentioned Microsoft, it is our parent company. But yes, one of my favorite facts that I learned along the way about artificial intelligence is that those mistakes are not called mistakes in AI world. They're called hallucinations. So now whenever I make mistakes in my work because I'm human, I will call them hallucinations.

For people in their work and being a leader internally at a company or your employer, how do you suggest people do that? Because a lot of times, organizations, as you know, are resistant to change quite often. People might sound crazy to say, "Why don't we try AI? Or why don't we start integrating this into our work?" How do you suggest people take that initiative to bring that up and maybe be seen as that leader to get ahead in their careers?

Sree: Yeah, brilliant question and something that's practical, right? One of the things you can do is to encourage, if there is a Lunch and Learn series that you have, some offices have that, go to HR and suggest that as a topic. I make a living by being a Lunch and Learn speaker, but that's not why I'm suggesting it because you don't need me. You could say, "Okay, everybody, we're going to do it ourselves. We're all going to learn a little bit and we're going to come in and then we're going to talk about this. Here's what I learned. Here's what she learned. And then we go around and we're going to talk back to you."

You can also find out what are the guidelines. Does your office have guidelines? A lot of places do not have any guidelines because they haven't come up with it yet. They haven't thought about it yet. HR, unfortunately, often has to be reactive to what's going on in the world. And once there are enough problems, that there will be a policy. Around the time when you were a student at Columbia, we put together the first social media policy at Columbia Journalism School, and it was the first on campus, we had been the first in the country. That was because the journalists were ahead in good and bad use of social media. So it was not like we were some visionaries. We were panicking because students were using it in some ways incorrectly in an office.

How do we learn? We don't need to master this stuff. I say it's for people not who are doing AI, but who are having AI done to them, and what is going to happen to most of us if we're not engineers. But even the engineers are going to suffer from what's happening with this. Because whenever there is efficiency, whenever there's productivity improvement, you're going to see that they will decide humans are not as needed as before. So what I tell people is, learn this stuff. See where you can show somebody.

So let's say you're an editor at a marketing agency and they say, "Oh, we're just going to use ChatGPT," you show them that this is why you need me. Look at the number of errors that this is discovering. Look at the problems it's doing. The context of writing is not so good. There was the GNet, the big publications company news company, suspended an AI sports writing feature that they were using to write it. It was because it was making mistakes and the writing was terrible. And the joke was that if the writing was good, then we could tolerate the inaccuracies. At least it would be good, but the writing was bad. And that's what happens. If any of you ever try this, you'll see that it will get better, it'll get smarter and more dangerous, but right now it's not that good.

Andrew: Yeah, that's really fantastic idea to sort of step up and be a leader. And then also, I think to end on a positive note too, humanity also has a way of keeping technology in check. Because I think there are times where we see technology come on the screen and we collectively say, "Ooh, too much." And I think Google Glass is an example of that where everyone thought, "Oh wow, people are going to be walking around with video cameras attached to their eyeballs." And some people did, but those sort of faded away. I think humans do have the ability to collectively say, "This is getting a little scary and we're not comfortable with it," and we can keep technology in check in some cases.

Sree: Yes, we hope so. I do want to be positive and to say that I am optimistic for a variety of reasons because I believe that in a world where there's all this technology, those things that I'd alluded to before, wisdom, knowledge, experience are going to help us. And expertise is going to matter. Human expertise is going to matter. And that in a world where everyone's a writer, the trained writer stands taller. In a world where everyone's a photographer, the trained photographer stands tall. I have a very good iPhone, I can take a picture, but you give this to a trained highest level photographer, he or she's going to take a much better picture than I am. And that's where our hope is, and that we might be able to say no. So if we approach it in that way, I think we will win, and we have hope.

Andrew: Yeah, definitely. And before I let you go, Sree, where can people find you? Obviously they could find you on LinkedIn, but where else?

Sree: Yeah, thank you for asking. I'm on all the platforms, but email still works. sree at sree dot net is my email. But this is LinkedIn's moment, folks. People should be concentrating, doubling down on LinkedIn as a tool to communicate, to share your expertise, to share your knowledge. That's what people love on LinkedIn. And you do that well, you're going to be successful. So hit me up on LinkedIn and I'd love to connect.

Andrew: Thanks so much, Sree.

Sree: Thank you.

Andrew: That was Sree Sreenivasan, CEO and co-founder of Digimentors. Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. Also, if you like this episode, please take a moment to leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. It helps people like you find the show. And don't forget to click that follow, subscribe, or whatever other button you find to get our podcast delivered to you every Wednesday because we'll continue these conversations on the next episode right here, wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Alexis Ramdaou. Rafa Farihah is our associate producer. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is head of news production. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Courtney Coupe is the head of original programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.