Freative Friday Episode 87 Video Podcast - AI or You

Welcome to Free to Friday. Mark Danolo here, art school MBA and CEO of Sales Globe. And it's that day of the week when we take a fresh look at creative logic driven problem solving. And in this episode I want to share with you a little history on innovation and introduction of innovation and what's happened with jobs with new technology. And then I want to offer you a view on the relationship between human and AI and how you can best maximize your asset value in that whole equation. So when it comes to AI, we hear a lot of headlines about all the great things AI is doing or it's going to do. And it's going to make a lot of ways that we do things manually obsolete. And at the same time it's going to make them better. Sounds promising, but we can also interpret some of the capabilities AI is going to have as threatening. Number one, to our security or our safety, like AI out of control and taking over. Kind of reminds me of that movie Ex Machina or number two to our jobs and careers. So AI is going to make what we do obsolete? Well, the first one's better left to the people in the organizations that understand and can address security issues. But I want to talk about the second one, which is something that we really need to dig into because within that there are a lot of opportunities for presented by AI to our jobs and our careers, depending on how we prepare ourselves right now. So I'm starting a conversation, what I'm calling AI or you, and it's about AI. And the opportunities are going to emerge based on how you maximize your value. It's not just about understanding your job and what it may look like in the future. It's understanding about what you may look like in the future in terms of where you play and how you think and how you create your own personal competitive advantage. And you have a decision to make about whether you're going to be the recipient of whatever AI brings to your organization, or if you're going to invest in the one personal asset you have that can't be AI'd, which is your human ability to creatively solve problems, then you can leverage AI most effectively and you can determine your direction personally and professionally. So a little history. Technological change isn't new by any means, but the speed and the degree and the impact of that change is becoming greater. But being good creative thinkers, we can use one of the principles I talked about a few times before, which is being a student of history and understand some helpful patterns. So I recently talked with a friend of mine, arv Mahatra. He's a professor of Strategy entrepreneurship at Kingdom Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill. And he shared a few valuable points on the history and future of work. And I want to give credit to ARV for his great thinking here. I'm going to share with you on some of the impact on jobs from new technologies. With the major technologies introduced over the last century, most of them did not reduce employment, they actually increased employment. For example, with the introduction of ATMs in the United States, with a few thousand in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which rose to about half a million today, we would have thought that bank teller jobs and similar jobs would have been eliminated, but they weren't. In fact, after an initial decrease, bank teller jobs actually increased to about 350,000 in the US today. And they're doing higher level work than the ATMs. Interesting clue. Higher level work. With the introduction of spreadsheet software in the late 1970s, we had VisiCalc. We would have expected bookkeeping jobs to decrease. And they did. From a peak of about 2 million bookkeepers in the US around 1983 when Lotus One Two Three was released, to about a million jobs right now. But with the capabilities that came along with spreadsheets, financial analysts and accounting jobs took off from about half a million jobs to about three and a half to four million jobs in total today. And again, higher level work enabled by a new technology. So if we take a bigger perspective, since automation in the 1950s, only one of the 270 occupations listed in the 1950 census has been eliminated due to automation. And that's elevator operator. Kind of shocking. Most of the other jobs were actually partially eliminated or automated, which created new roles and new jobs. So history is great because it gives us patterns. And so what can these patterns tell us about what new technology and what AI might do with the future of jobs? If a job is completely automated, then automation can reduce employment for that job. But if the job's only partially automated, it can actually increase employment. So what are the characteristics of the roles that increase rather than decrease? Well, they may do things that are based on new needs created by the new technology, or the roles may be doing higher level work and they leverage that technology. So as I mentioned already, there's one area that we know that can't be AI'd, which is your ability to be a human creative problem solver while leveraging AI. Sure, AI can parrot creativity. In fact, right now Chat GPT can make a drawing or an illustration or practically anything. And it can show you multiple variations in styles based on your request, but as of this point, it, it's simply parroting what you ask it to do. And AI will emulate creative problem solving in the future, but it'll do that based on questions and interpretations of problems that most likely humans will still input. It reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing. I was a designer in New York when desktop publishing and design software came out. And we thought it was going to be the end of the designer. But what we found was that anyone at their kitchen table or sitting in front of the TV could actually do horrific design. And it did, did little to solve the problem. And it didn't have much communication value. It was like giving a child a loaded motorcycle. It just led to unfortunate things. So let's look at the relationship between human and AI more graphically and you'll see it's a symbiotic relationship that depends on human creativity. And you'll see where you can play here. The human AI model looks at two important dimensions in what we want to accomplish. Overall, we have outputs or answers on the horizontal axis, but those outputs have to come from some source or some inspiration, which are questions on the vertical axis. So without good questions, we don't have good outputs or good answers. If we have data driven questions like you see in the bottom two quadrants, they play to AI strengths which are generating answers to those questions or generating ideas based on those questions. And I use the word ideas here with quotation marks because these are machine ideas which we'll talk about in a moment. The combination of these data driven inputs and questions can result in what I call machine innovation, which you see to the right hand side here. And we get tons of ideas or combinations. But in the end we, the humans need to evaluate those ideas. In fact, we're doing that right now. Every time we run AI, we're evaluating what comes out. And since we're in the early stages of the AI evolution, we have to use a big filter because lots of it is irrelevant or low quality. And, and a lot of it turns up some gems. In the bottom quadrants we have data intensive, data driven work that relies on pulling, evaluating and processing large amounts of information. The work may be repetitive or it may be one off from a sales perspective. Some examples might be processing large amounts of customer data or determining the most attractive customer segments, understanding patterns of customer behavior, evaluating how our sales process is working, conducting routine, repetitive tasks, and the list goes on. In the top two quadrants, if we have creative questions, these Play to the strengths of humans. These are human questions that are looking for answers and also the blue sky areas of human explored ideas. These are the questions and exploration that require understanding, empathy, intuition and perception. Things that are innately human, not machine. These result in human innovation that you also see to the right. This work could be unique, like solving a problem creatively, or it could be repetitive, like engaging in human relationship building from a sales perspective. Some examples might be understanding the culture of an organization, reading a room. Of course, AI could read the facial expressions and the body language in a room if you had cameras in the room. Understanding hidden agendas and reading between the lines of a conversation. Empathizing with the needs of another human, a customer, someone in your organization or someone in your life. Creatively solving a problem in a humanly responsive way, understanding how to communicate and implement a solution. And the list goes on and on. Of course, there's an interaction and a synergistic relationship between human innovation and machine innovation that comes up with the best, most effective ideas. But there's also something else. If you look at that arrow in the middle, Even the AI driven machine innovation requires human queries to drive it. So there's a critical role for human creativity on the idea and question generation front and the evaluation of outputs front. Even if we're leveraging AI. And this speaks to the importance of building your one most valuable human asset, which is the ability to be an effective human creative problem solver. With AI and sales, AI may never have the ability to sense the needs of a customer, read the room and interpret a customer problem, or have the empathy to understand a situation. It may never be able to walk through a customer's office or a factory floor and understand the dynamics or culture. It may never be able to ride along with a salesperson and walk the route. It may never have the ability to come up with the right humanly creative answer to solve problems that are innately human. And most problems are are innately human. Because most product and service needs, even if they're highly technical, involve understanding and addressing human needs. The landscape's changing quickly, so it's time to understand where you can play by drawing upon your strengths and powers and very importantly, building your superpowers as a human creative problem solver and understanding how to leverage AI as it evolves. In these conversations, we're going to explore how AI works and how it may evolve in terms of its strengths and, and what your organization's higher level human strengths may be. So you can not only leverage AI more effectively, but you can also build the creative assets of yourself and your organization. We're going to look at different dimensions of sales and the AI and human strengths. And we'll take a look at some different areas of sales like the sales process, top of the funnel in the sales process and making that a more efficient and more effective post sale. And we'll also look at sales and revenue operations, getting insight on sales performance, competitor insight, sales strategy, segmentation, offer and value proposition, sales organization design, increasing our sales capacity, incentive compensation and quotas. This is a big list clearly, and AI is going to be monumental for sales. So consider these dimensions of where AI can play and where you can build your most valuable human human assets to leverage AI and move to a higher level. And join me as we continue the AIRU conversation and use these ideas in your free to Friday and every day.