Cameron Herold argues that companies must adopt AI or risk being outcompeted; he urges employees to experiment regularly with AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Midjourney, Descript) and share learnings, and advises leaders to prioritize system optimization and automation over simply hiring more staff.
Chapters
If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And right now, companies that don't adopt AI will die. Right. Someone out there will do it better and faster. Twelve months ago, when AI first really kind of blew up into the world, January, February of 2023, everyone was really nervous. You know, we're going to be out of jobs, companies are going to go bankrupt. It's going to change the massive industry. And that's absolutely happened. Right, right. It's massive shifts in the digital marketing space, massive shifts in the copywriting space, massive shifts in, in the software development space. Yeah. It hasn't necessarily put tons of people out of work yet, but I've really seen a leap for the companies that are adopting AI. So what I've been and what I mean by that is looking for ways to innovate and to make their business faster. Right. How do you get more done with less people faster? AI is definitely a tool for that. So about eight months ago, I started talking on social media and publicly about the only employees that should be worried about losing their jobs to AI are the employees that don't actually leverage and use AI day to day. Right. Almost like if you said 30 years ago, well, I'm not going to use the Internet. Well, that's cool. Thirty years ago that was okay. But now you're kind of out of a job. Right. Or I'm not going to use a computer, I'm going to use a typewriter. Okay, well, now you're out of a job. AI is going to be a tool that every employee uses. And the ones who are ahead of that curve and are learning how to leverage AI, I think are the ones that have the head start. So I've been introducing our CEO of Alliance members to a dashboard called there's an AI for that. Have you seen this? Yes. It's amazing. It's got like 10,000 approximately different AI tools that exist to do thousands and thousands of different jobs. And all I want employees doing is playing with different tools. Almost like remember when you were in grade three and you had to do a book report? Yeah. And all the kids had to read a book and then come in on Monday and do a five minute presentation about what you learned from the book. So what I want employees doing is spending a couple of hours a week playing with any AI tool. Play with Descript, play with Mid Journey, play with ChatGPT, you know, the one that everybody talks about. Play with something. Right. Play with be human. Play with a different tool and then come in on Monday and say, hey, I tried this tool, here's what I did, here's what I learned. And everybody else will absorb that information. Adults learn in this different cycle. Adults learn through the abstract concepts, right? So we learn maybe by listening to someone or watching a video. Then we learn with the active experimentation, like practicing, trying it out. Then we learn with the concrete experience of using it in our day to day jobs. And then we learn with reflective observation, thinking back to what we were learning. So there's a cycle of learning. So if an employee plays with a tool, they're like, hey, I tried it, I learned it was interesting. Couldn't really apply it. But if they teach it to someone, that helps their learning and other people go, oh, I'll try that too. Then they tinker with it and they play with it so they get some more learning happening. They might try it and they're. Then they can use it in the day to day, right? Anybody who's ever done a job posting to hire somebody. Yeah, it's like, like you're the head of engineering and you write up this good job posting and you post it. Yeah, it kind of sucks. Like, it's not a sales letter. It hasn't popped off the page. You haven't taken it and given it to a copywriter. Now the head of engineering can take a job posting, put it into ChatGPT and say, rewrite this so that it sounds more like a sales letter that sizzles, so that it leverages NLP so that it's a really good polarizing job posting. And it feels like our company culture, right? It pops out and it's like, that's really good. So that's kind of the concrete experience of using it. And I think companies just need to play with it and use it. And I think those tools can actually help us be more effective. One huge bit that I disagree with is people who say, I have 30 years experience, I have 20 years experience. No, you don't. You've got five years experience four times in a row or five years experience six times in a row. Yes, because the reality is, if I heard a saying years ago, that has always stuck with me and it's so, so applicable to AI. If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And right now, companies that don't adopt AI will die. Right? Someone out there will do it better and faster. So the problem with most managers, right, early stage managers first time managers, even managers that have been managing people for the, like, last five years, their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people. That's never actually the real answer to the problem. If you go to first principles or root cause, what actually they should be doing is analyzing the system, analyzing the journey, map it all out, try to find more efficient ways to do it, more automated ways to do it, ways to outsource it. So true leadership has the ability to kind of sit back and look at the situations and look at the problems from a different perspective and see how can we automate this? AI comes into that, right? How can we optimize this? AI can come into that. How do we outsource this? AI can come into that. And. And it's the leaders who are looking at that instead of saying, throw more people at the issue. The only time I've ever seen a company that can just throw bodies at it is if you're based in India, right? You just hire 10 more people, right? Because the cost of labor is so low, if you're operating in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle east, you can't just throw bodies. You have to find the efficiencies. And I think leaders need to do that.
