8 Ideas to Help You Think About AI in New Ways
As the AI conversation has grown and grown, I have thought often of the author and coach, Jamie Smart.
About ten years ago, I was sitting in a small workshop with Smart at Regent’s University in London.
Smart, who I interviewed a few years ago on The Coach’s Journey Podcast, was already talking about AI then, as I remember it.
He said something like this: over the next few decades, technology will take over huge swathes of jobs. And that makes getting into something like coaching a great idea, because the most human jobs are the ones it will be hardest to replace.
I could see the clear sense in his words, and I notice in this moment how grateful I am for what he said, and the calm they have enabled me to have in the face of the extraordinary AI revolution that is taking place. And I know that that is a blessing when, for some people, their work has dried up or they can sense what is just over the horizon, and the prospects look bleak.
The world, it seems, is changing again.
Ever faster, ever more unpredictable, change.
As the AI conversation has expanded, even without seeking it out, I have collected ideas about this technology. About how to use it and how to think about it.
Here are some of them.
A client of mine, a leader of developers in a scale up business, told me that if he had been ten years younger he would have dedicated all his spare time to understanding what it was good at and how to get really good at getting it to do that. That’s the impact it will have on coders. The game becomes: get really good at prompting it, and at doing the things it can’t do (yet).
Seth Godin remembered that there were companies at one point who ‘weren’t companies that use electricity’. There are companies now who don’t use AI. But in the future… there won’t be.
Samiur Rahman, the co-founder of AI thought partner Heyday said that he thinks pretty soon AI will be able to be as good as an 80th percentile coach. And he – with his Bangladeshi heritage front of mind – spoke convincingly about the incredible access to coaching that will give to the less wealthy people on the planet. The challenge for coaches, and people in any industry where AI might soon be an 80th percentile at the jobs we do: be as good as we can be, at the things we are uniquely suited to. And at the things that are most human.
The branding coach Bob Gentle gave me a great lens to think about how to use AI in your work: treat it like an intern. Get it to draft for you, research for you, brainstorm for you. But don’t let it loose on your customers, whoever they are… not until it’s learned a lot more, at least. If you’ve used it much, you’ll know it makes factual mistakes and tries a little too hard to please us… just like we all did when we were interns.
If you’re a writer, don’t let it write for you: who are you if it writes your blogs or your books? But if you’re not a writer, it’s amazing and can draft all kinds of things to a somewhat shockingly high standard.
AI will never write my blogs, or my social media posts. (Social Media is a strange enough place without it being full of AI-written posts. Let’s keep some of it human.) But I’m using it in all kinds of ways, more and more.
My favourite metaphor for how to think about where we are with AI came from Wakanyi Hoffman, who I saw speak at the Inner Development Goals Summit in Stokholm in 2024. Bringing her knowledge of African folklore and indiginous wisdom to the biggest questions about this kind of technology, Hoffman compared the creation of AI to the discovery of fire.
But, she said, the crucial moment wasn’t the discovery of fire. It was the taming of fire.
As stories of the damage we have done to a generation of young people through social media and smartphones become clearer, in what Jonathan Haidt calls the great rewiring, I can’t help but wonder what the costs of this technology will be before we manage to tame this fire.
Jazz Rasool, one of the leading thinkers on AI in coaching, was a keynote speaker at a conference I was on a panel at last week. He used a similar metaphor to Hoffman: that AI technology is like radioactive material. Undoubtedly useful, undoubtedly carrying risks.
He pointed out people used to spread radioactive material on their faces at first…
And of course the benefits of this technology, so helpful, already replacing Google to help me solve all kinds of problems, are so present. The more you play with it, the better you get at using it, the more you can spot what it is good for and what it struggles with. And the more you see it improving before your eyes.
Knowing how to use this technology is impossible. Knowing the implications is impossible.
Thinking about it carefully is important.
And crucially, from Smart, to Rahman, to Rasool, to Hoffman, the message seems clear to me.
In Rasool’s words, don’t atrophy your humanity.
It’s the greatest currency you have in the AI world.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.