AI but fun-sized.
(Personal) onramps to (corporate) competence, tbh.
I am consistently surprised at how my friends differ in their views AI.
Some of them can only exhale with irritation about colleagues who are seemingly obsessed.
Others are excited and, like me, constantly thinking about how it might be leveraged in new and creative ways and what we might build if we had more than a leaky fire hydrant of mediocre ideas between the hours that we spend working at our Main Jobs.
A few friends (non-denominationally, bless them) are willing to embark on the meandering philosophical “could be, would be, should be” train with me.
When I think about why my different friends feel differently about AI—and why, beyond my surely insular friend group living in New York City, the broader population might have differing opinions—I keep coming back to the context of where these people work, who their friends are, and how AI has to date been integrated or not into their lives.
My friends who are most keen on AI (albeit I would love to believe, philosophically aware of its limitations and potential) have taken themselves onto the bunny slopes or, to mix metaphors, dipped their toe into the shallow or not-so-shallow end of the pool.
Yes, some of these friends work in tech, but not all of them.
My friends who are less keen on AI have been told they can use co-pilot at work.
I have a lot to say on the above because I think about it a lot, but I’m going to try to hit on one point here and the rest later (… laughs at self. Sure).
Steve Jobs raised the notion of highlighting features versus benefits and I think this aligns well with the narrative rails I find my friends on.
In my opinion, the way we talk about AI to most people (aka many of my friends) tends not to be tremendously benefits-oriented.
So much of the narrative right now is around new models and the latest feature releases; it’s dominated, at least as far as I can tell, based on my algorithms, by B2B conversations. Tangential to none of the narrative is around fascinating ways that are quick and easy to learn that people can use in their daily lives.
Yes, we’ve talked about being more efficient and being more productive.
But what does it actually, truly feel like to be more efficient? Is there something else that’s more palpable for most people?
Natural curiosity has helped some of my friends leapfrog the necessity for benefits-related marketing.
But for others—the ones that have been told to use AI tools, like co-pilot at work, only for it to turn out a bunch of slop—a different approach to getting them on the bus, so to speak, is needed.
If there was a stronger narrative and more diverse content around micro-use cases for AI—more: here’s how to find good coffee shops with Wi-Fi and outlets, or here’s where to take your parents to dinner so that they can hear you and see the menu, without deep diving shotty Yelp reviews versus here’s how to write an email or blinking cursors in empty text boxes— I have to believe more of my friends would be on board.
They might spend a few minutes being delighted instead of disappointed.
The inertia of delight is underestimated.