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1. Always invite AI to the table.
To get you started with AI, I have four guiding principles that I like to start people with. The first principle is always invite AI to the table. Use it for everything you legally and ethically can. And that is because you do not know what AI can do. And, likely, the creators of the AI system you are using do not know what it can do for you and your industry, your job, your life. You have to use it to figure it out. Ask it questions about an idea that you have. Help it write a memo for you. With the permission of people in the room, have it record what’s happening and give you feedback on your performance, summarize notes for you, write code, analyze data. You won’t know what it’s good or bad at until you use it and you might find some really surprising insights of what it can do well, and you might find some disappointments. That’s part of the process. So you have to use it to learn how it works.
2. Be the human in the loop.
My second principle is to be the human in the loop. And this is an idea from control systems that you should always have a human involved in final decision-making. And I think that’s important. We have to decide where humans fit in decision-making when we start letting AI do things. But it’s also a deeply personal principle because AI actually does a lot of tasks quite well, and there’s a good chance that some of the tasks you do for your job, the AI might already do better than you. Part of what you wanna think about is what tasks do I actually want to do? A lot of times, what you wanna do is actually focus on what makes you human, what human task you like the best, and think about how do I give the stuff I don’t wanna do to the AI to help me with? How do I get support from the AI rather than think about it as a potential replacement or as a competitor? And I think there’s a deep set of questions we need to think about what do we wanna do with our lives? What do we actually wanna focus on? Where is our talent? And using that talent, I think, is a very powerful way of thinking about how an AI empowers us all.
3. Treat AI like a person.
My third principle is to treat AI like a person and tell it what kind of person it is. Talk to it like an employee, like an intern, and you’ll get a large part of the way there. And on top of that, tell it what kind of person it is. So AI works better with context. Give it a context by telling it you are an expert marketer. You are a lesson plan designer. And that gives the AI context to understand what kind of questions you’re asking and how. The danger of treating the AI like a person is you’re committing the cardinal sin of AI researchers, which is to pretend that a computer is a human. There’s a lot of reasons you don’t want to pretend a computer is a human. It’s not a human. It doesn’t think like a human. You might start to become more persuaded by it. You might become blind to its biases. You might think it’s more capable than it is. AI works a little bit like a psychic. It’s really good at figuring out what you wanna hear from it and then telling you what you wanna hear. And so it’s very easy to lose track of that if you start treating like a human being. Use it like a human, but also always keep in the back of your mind, I’m talking to a machine. There’s no mind behind this. There’s no emotion or personality.
4. Assume this is the worst AI you’ll ever use.
The fourth and final principle is assume this is the worst AI you’re ever going to use. We are in the middle of technological progress, not at the end. The progression of AI has been extraordinarily rapid, and it’s hard to measure directly. There’s a lot of test scores and attempts to measure it, but I tend to think of it kind of subjectively. When you think about GPT 3, which was an earlier AI and it came out in 2021, it wrote at about the level of a sixth grader, which was really amazing. I was like, wow, I can’t believe it could write this well. By the time GPT 3.5 came out, which was the version that came with ChatGPT, in the end of 2022, that wrote about as well as a sophomore in college. And then GPT 4, which came out in 2023, is about as good a writer as a freshman PhD. That’s a very fast progression. And we know that GPT 5 and other technologies in the timeline, you may already have access to those by the time you watch this video. And this is a pretty fast progression. We don’t know how far it’s going to go. We don’t know how good these systems are gonna get. We’re not in control of how fast these systems improve. We are in control of how we decide to use them and how we decide to apply them. As managers and leaders, you get to make these choices about how to deploy these systems to increase human flourishing rather than necessarily replacing people or watching them more closely. As individuals, we get to decide how to be the human who uses these systems well rather than having the systems tell us what to do, and we get to make a lot of decisions this way.